Spraying E85 like nitrous?

[Midnight_Cobra]

Just curious about this. Bash me if you want. Is it even possible, or a benefit. I know you will say, "what about nitrous retard". I'm not saying I would do this, just expanding my knowledge horizon. :banana:

 

[Zacharyx]

Don't think there is enough energy in E85 to do anything but cause a a really rich spot, Meth would probably be a better bet, and then more in non-roots/TS/PD application

 

[Teej281]

I thought about posing the idea of running e85 instead of methanol in a meth kit. It's got the alcohol content. I think it'd work well.

 

[HotStart]

Just curious about this. Bash me if you want. Is it even possible, or a benefit. I know you will say, "what about nitrous retard". I'm not saying I would do this, just expanding my knowledge horizon. :banana:

It would be completely possible to introduce E85 or ethanol to the engine like nitrous (either through a nozzle,plate kit, or direct port) but if you're looking for nitrous like gains, you won't find them simply from the fuel. The ethanol in and of itself does not have the energy potential needed to increase combustion pressure to show big gains like that.

If you wanted to use it similarly to a methanol injection system you could, but there would be no performance advantage injecting ethanol over methanol.

I thought about posing the idea of running e85 instead of methanol in a meth kit. It's got the alcohol content. I think it'd work well.

It would work, but methanol would work far better. The latent heat of vaporization, which is the amount of heat (energy) required to convert a given unit (mass) of a liquid into the vapor without a change in temperature is much higher in methanol than ethanol, 1100 KJ/Kg to 846 KJ/Kg.

As you can see, methanol will take more heat energy out of the air during its injection than ethanol given the same mass. Where methanol would again show an advantage over ethanol would be in how much would be needed during injection. Assuming that you wanted to target the same lambda ratio with the use of both fuels, you would have to introduce much more methanol than ethanol, since Methanol has a stoichiometric ratio of 6.4:1, and ethanol has a stoichiometric ratio of 9:0:1. This means that you would have to consume almost 40% more methanol by mass (and almost by volume since their density is very similar) than you would ethanol, to achieve the same lambda target.

So not only does methanol take away more heat energy than ethanol given the same amount, but you end up using more methanol which compounds the effect, ultimately giving methanol a huge advantage for knock suppression over ethanol.