What FIA regulations would allow F1 cars to use plain roadside gas station Ethanol?
Car manufacturers focus more and more on being green, or at least giving the impression that their cars actually are.
If FIA decided to allow Ethanol common E85 and E70 blends to be used
Would they allow bigger fuel tanks for thanol cars?
Lower minimum weight to compensate for the larger amounts of ethanol required?
Higher flow rates for 2014 turbos?
Larger engine displacements?
Ethanol, as it is currently produced in the US is a dead end, energy wise.
It's a net energy loss to create, and the only reason they do it is because the farm subsidies make corn and corn by products (high fructose corn syrup, corn starch, corn flour, cattle grade corn, etc.) virtually free.
Apparently sugar cane, and some types of grass are much better options, but they aren't used in North America.
Ethanol, as it is currently produced in the US is a dead end, energy wise
Quite so. Free markets are great, or so everyone seems to think. But when the profits of capitalism are then used to distort government policy, they tend to be less so.
More to your point was this story at Inhabitat.com just yesterday:
What would be the purpose of Ethanol in F1? What would be the point / purpose of any straight consumer pump gas in F1?
I would have to think that using pump gas of any flavor would be a pain in the ass for engine guys, and a substantial performance loss. Race gas is it's own thing.
Grip is a four letter word. All opinions are my own and not those of current or previous employers.
right now (as Expensive hints) cellulosic Methanol is about the only temperate-climate SI biofuel that is carbon-efficient
so eg in Europe we have 5% Ethanol in our SI motor fuel, not 85%
Methanol was once made from distillation of fermented wood slurry, hence the name wood alcohol
carbon-neutral is the way we in the UK ignore the carbon cost of renewables
we have just opened a straw-burning CHP plant at Sleaford
and a huge wheat-fuelled ethanol/cattle feed plant (which has 50% of the carbon cost of petrol/gasoline)
and burn huge amounts of wood pellets imported eg from the USA
Ethanol and Methanol are on a mass or volume basis even worse fuels than the headline figures (calorific values) suggest
at least 5% lower in heat content (than F1 fuel optimised for specific energy) in the combustible amounts ie related to air
and their very high latent heat of vapourisation (factored by these amounts) steals energy, causing eg Ricardo to allow for this
so we would need 170 kg of E85 or 250 kG of 100% Methanol to do the job of 100 kG of 2014-rule fuel
100% Methanol (and no refuelling) would encourage fuel-efficiency via its weight-saving potential
so we wouldn't need any formal limits on fuel quantity or rate
Last edited by Tommy Cookers on 25 Oct 2013, 18:02, edited 1 time in total.
Alot of cars and buses these days run on natural gas. Is this something that could work?
I´m not sure what the energy output is compared to gasoline but a question nonetheless.
"If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then brother that person is a piece of sh*t"
wiki wrote:
One GGE of natural gas is 126.67 cubic feet (3.587 m3) at standard conditions. This volume of natural gas has the same energy content as one US gallon of gasoline (based on lower heating values: 900 BTU/cu ft of natural gas and 115,000 BTU/gal of gasoline).[15]
One GGE of CNG pressurized at 2,400 psi (17 MPa) is 0.77 cubic foot (21.8 liters). This volume of CNG at 2,400 psi has the same energy content as one US gallon of gasoline (based on lower heating values: 148,144 BTU/cu ft of CNG and 115,000 BTU/gal of gasoline.[15] Using Boyle's Law, the equivalent GGE at 3,600 psi (25 MPa) is 0.51 cubic foot (14.4 L or 3.82 actual US gal).
The National Conference of Weights & Measurements (NCWM) has developed a standard unit of measurement for compressed natural gas, defined in the NIST Handbook 44 Appendix D as follows: "1 Gasoline [US] gallon equivalent (GGE) means 2.567 kg (5.660 lb) of natural gas."[16]
When consumers refuel their CNG vehicles in the USA, the CNG is usually measured and sold in GGE units. This is fairly helpful as a comparison to gallons of gasoline.
This does fail to take into account the pressure vessel required to hold the CNG
Jersey Tom wrote:What would be the purpose of Ethanol in F1? .
There is actually one big advantage to using ethanol as a race fuel. There is only one chemical composition for ethanol. So the fuel used by every team would be exactly the same.
"Q: How do you make a small fortune in racing?
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