Has anybody ever seen anything about switching over to e85 with fuel injection. If anybody knows anything or if you have any links I would appreciate it greatly.

thanks

 

you will need pumps/injectors/hose/gaskets/misc. stuff approved for use with alcohol type fuels. Alcohol is much more corrosive that reg gasoline.
the owners manual for my 96 says NEVER use E85 or any other type of methenol/ethenol based fuel due to this reason.

 

There have been quite a few threads on E85 on impalass.com in the engine and PCM forums. There are at least a couple of guys over there using it in their LT1s.

 

With E85 you need about 30% more fuel volume for the same amount of air.

You have a few options to do that.
*Custom chip
*Change injectors
*Raise fuel pressure by about 70% ( 43 psi to 73 psi ).
Or a combination of these.

The O2 sensor will still work so the ECM will try to add fuel if it is lean. It will not add 30% and that is why you need to add extra fuel.

A car that can use E85 has an ECM that allow more change from the O2 sensor to allow for 30% extra fuel when you run on E85. A gas ECM is limited to about 10% extra fuel.

E85 is more corrosive than gas, but nowhere as corrosive as Methanol.
All gas already has some ethanol, 5% to 10%. E85 has 85% ethanol and the rest is gas. If the fuel parts would not handle some ethanol, then the gas would not already have 10% ethanol content. The parts will age sooner, the question is how much sooner. What is the expected life of a fuel pump? 15 years? Running E85 might cause the pump to fail in 10 years instead, or 8 years. And then if the pump fails, it is hard to say if it failed because of ethanol or if it would have faild anyway.

Ethanol works as a solvant and that is the first risk. If you have a lot of goo in the fuel tank and fuel lines you can clog the fuel filter and injectors. That is a more probable cause of failure than the E85 itself.

It is similar problem as using a syntetic oil in an old engine that has not been taken care of.

It is a gamble.


If you want to run on E85 then start with a mix, 20% E85 and 80% gas. Any engine should handle that but the ECM could take a while to re learn.

 

Why?

 

Here in sweden it was a major price differance, a gallon gas was about 60% more. If mileage goes down by 15% it is still a lot cheaper to run on E85.

Turbo ... E85 has higher octane and cools the air a lot more. It you convert to E85 you can run a lot higher boost and more timing without detonation and that translates to more power.

And it is more enviromental friendly.

 

exactly

 

when we were forced to run 10% corn oil crap by federal mandateall our cars got 4to 6 mpg less.i think you will find a lot less mpg than 15%. also you will find the price of e85 going up drastically, as corn supply production is less than demand. to hell with junk science and enviro *****!

 

trust me i grew up in the country so i am not a tree hugger by any means. The environment part isnt that important to me. its the performance and higher octane to support my high compression and so on. I wish people would open their minds a little more about E85 and not see it as only environmental.

 

http://www.wqad.com/Global/story.asp?S=3972760

[quote]The gas was carefully measured, 2 gallons each, into identical trucks. The only difference was the color. The black Silverado was filled with regular gas; the white one was filled with E85.
[/guote]

[quote]Our truck running on gasoline got 28 miles-per-gallon. The truck with E85 ended up with a little over 25 miles-per-gallon.
[/guote]

(28-25)/28 = 0.107

This test show 11% less mileage with E85 at a steady 35 mph.

 

i saw a documentary on brazil a few weeks back on discovery channell, there 100% on non petroleum fuel for there auto's/trucks.. they obtain ther fuel from sugar cane,,even the bulk from the plant is recycled into fuel to run the refinery

 

I have used ethanol safe steel braided teflon for the pressure side a ethanol safe hose for 'no pressure' fuel hoses because I had to modify the fuel lines anyway. I am running E85 for my turbo setup. Fuel pump, regualtor and injectors are standard gas parts.

You all know how methanol dragsters run, and why they use methanol instead of regular gas.

The properties of E85 are between gas and methanol. The benefits over methanol are that ethanol is way less corrosive so you can use standard pumps and injectors with a slightley reduced life expecancy. You can also buy it cheap at a regular gas stations so you can use it in a daily driver.

 

I was at the Lincoln Mercury dealer Friday getting a recall taken care of on my 97 F-150. I noticed FLEX FUEL on several window stickers, so I guess more and more cars are being built with E85 in mind.

 

[QUOTE=JoBy;1558513076]With E85 you need about 30% more fuel volume for the same amount of air.

Ethanol works as a solvant and that is the first risk. If you have a lot of goo in the fuel tank and fuel lines you can clog the fuel filter and injectors. That is a more probable cause of failure than the E85 itself.

It is a gamble.

I agree, I have a 2003 E-85 compatiable Suburban. I tried using E-85 for awhile after I had about 30,000 miles. After about 3000 miles on E-85 I had a fuel pump fail probably due to trying to pump the gunk that the alcohol washed out of the fuel tank. In regard to fuel mileage, 10 mpg on E-85 and 13.6 on regular undleaded gasoline.

 

E85 also has a faster flame front than gasoline.

Even though alcohol fuels have a less energy/mass than gasoline you burn can alcohol fuels at a much higher fuel/air ratio which usually makes the alcohol fuels edge out in total heat addition.


E85's total heat addition is close to gasoline. In fact last time I worked it, it was slightly less however, E85 has a pretty nice latent heat of evaporation which sucks heat out of the intake charge. All fuels in IC engines must evaporate, alcohol fuel pulls more heat when doing so than gasoline. That can boost VE and curb pre-ignition (allowing ignition to be optimally timed) both of which make more power.

 

From everything I've read E85 has a noticably lower energy potential, I think somewhere less than 75% the BTU rating of gasoline. So you should need higher boost levels to get the same energy out of the combustion.

 

THIS IS THE BIG MISCONCEPTION

Less BTU/pound but it burns at a much higher Fuel/air ratio so total heat is more (typically) with alcohol fuels

 

Gas has a higher energy content than ethanol, about 50% more (from the same weight).

Ethanol has a lower AFR for stoichiometric combustion, so you need more fuel for the same amout of air ... about 50% more from the same fuel weight.

Combined this means that a fixed amount of air flow will result in almost exactly the same power.

An engine is basically an air-pump. Regardless of fuel it will pump the same CFM and produce the same horsepower.

Using E85 the engine can handle more boost and that will give you more CFM and that will give you more power.

A N/A engine will not se any power increase from E85.

Mehtanol has even less energy than ethanol. Methanol also has a much lower AFR than ethanol so in this case the same amount of air will result in more horsepower.

 

Yup.

And the comment about running more timing, this does not always mean more power. Even on a gas engine you can start to loose power if you advance the timing too far. Your timing curve needs to be determed by what fuel you are using. The idea is to ignite the air:fuel mixture so that the piston is starting to be pushed downward as it hits the top of it's stroke and begins to sink in the bore. E85 has a different burn rate than gasoline. 87 octane has a different burn rate from 93 octane. 87 octane burns a faster, so more timing will cause the combustion to start pushing down on the piston sooner, too much and it's pushing down on the piston as it's still on it's way up. I haven't seen any tests, but I would think E85 would burn slower than gasoline accounting for the need for a greater timing advance.

 

There is a lot of wrong info in this post.

1. You can make more power with alcohol fuels, even naturally aspirated. There is a reason why a lot of racers use alcohol fuels like Indy. Indy used methanol blends for quite a while and recently switched to ethanol fuels.

http://racing.honda.com/about/engine.aspx

2. Ethanol has a fast flame travel speed compared to gasoline. Methanol is extremely fast. This means the burn angle is little to almost none in the case of methanol. So, you can run more advance with a alcohol fuel, but you don't need to.. in fact optimal advance is going to be less than gasoline setups (usually). What makes alcohol fuels attractive is they are not prone to pre-ignition which allows the engine to be optimally timed before running into pre-ignition.

Does this make sense? If your using gasoline and you need 25 degrees of burn angle and 10 degrees of flame propagation but anything over 32 degrees induces knock than you have a problem because you are not able to optimally time your engine. Pre-ignition happens because of the huge pressures at the edges of the ignited mixture as you approach TDC. This is problem espeically with FI engines.

You may also make more power on a NA engine because of the higher heat addition and increased volumetric effeciency. (Look at Indy)

The final part of your post is mixing up Octane rating to flame travel. There is a big difference. 93 octane can burn just as fast (or faster) than 87. The difference is the auto-ignition temp/pressure is higher and the induction period (time of dissociation needed so fuel "gets prepared" to knock) is longer
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