Author Topic: has anyone considered diy ethanol blends?  (Read 4572 times)

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Offline noss

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has anyone considered diy ethanol blends?
« on: Sep 13, 2011, 11:57AM »
other than the fact that distilling alcohol at home in australia is illegal, has anyone here considered distilling their own to make their own ethanol blend? i have read write ups from different people in the past, who all seem to say its no worth it unless you're only using it in small amounts (i.e. 10% ehtanol), however these people don't have the ability to tune their cars, where as i and others here do.

do you think i'd be able to create alcohol consistently enough at home to be able to use it reliably in my car? or can their be issues stemming from differences in water supply due to impurities etc introduced at different times in the year or depending on how good the water authorities chlorinator in your street main is?

running on a higher percentage of ethanol has its advantages as well, specifically if tuned properly, more power. the obvious disadvantage though is that economy on ethanol is lacking.


any thoughts? anyone tried it or considered it before? would it be best to run as a fuel additive/replacement, or in an alcohol injection system? would it even work for alcohol injection? lol.


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Offline Sticky

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Re: has anyone considered diy ethanol blends?
« Reply #1 on: Sep 13, 2011, 12:54PM »
The fact that E85 is seriously hard to find in QLD would be a good reason to atleast look into the feasability of doing such a project, as well as the fact that you have the ability to tune you car to suit whatever particular blend of ethanol you decide to go with. I think the biggest issue would be trying to keep a consistant level of product being produced, before id go and throw some farm fresh, home made ethanol in my car, id want to be sure of its quality, thus i think some sort of Q&A would have to take place.

Also, as you mentioned, Ethanol blends are not renowned for their outstanding fuel economy. You'd also have to go to larger injectors, fuel pumps and the like to support the use of higher percentage ethanol blends as is my understanding.


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Offline Cheezel

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Re: has anyone considered diy ethanol blends?
« Reply #2 on: Sep 13, 2011, 01:07PM »
Distilery equipmet isnt that expensive anymore, depending on the degree youre goin to. If you wanna run you car 24/7 on homebrew, the cost of equipment to produce that much wouldnt be worth it. That might be a bit premature.. What sort of levels are you talking about? 25% ethanol or higher?

Impurities in water can be controlled easily. Either buy demineralised water in bulk, which isnt that expensive, or if you want a more long term solution use your own water filter and distilery. Theres enough water filters available on the industrial scale, no reason youc couldnt obtain an "offcut" of their filters going through the manufacturer. The big issue if you wanna run something like that is biofouling - this will usually be a sludge, but given the minute quantitites youll have, just dump it in the garden. :)

The idea of it is fantastic, but it depends on what concentrations you wanna run as to whether or not its a financially feasible idea...

I certainly would minimise straight tap water in the creation process though, for the sake of entirely repeatable results. The chlorine would be a small issue, but youd also have notable amounts of various metals, which would hurt your cat something fierce, worst case blocking the filtering elements (platinum-something?) with a physical barrier, then its GG cat.

Pure alcohol injection has a complrtely different combustion temperature doesnt it? Forgive me for doubting your tuning, but i dont know how much can be adjusted. :D

If you wanna run pure alcohol youre goingto need crazy  amounts being in production, given poor fuel efficiency, and depending on your ethanol source this might not be viable without a full basement sized distillery. Then again i dont know the efficiency of turning say vegetable mass into ethanol mass, so i could be talking out my ass right here.

The cost of setup would write this off for me. Unless you could sell the stuff, but then youd need a bigger distillery... Chicken v the egg i guess :D

Offline noss

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Re: has anyone considered diy ethanol blends?
« Reply #3 on: Sep 13, 2011, 03:01PM »
i know all about water filtering, i work in hydraulics design.. i can get a series of 3 bag filters and a uv filter for around $1200 for domestic applications, however, a little bit too much of an outlay to consider, especially if it doesn't go any good. also, i only use 1 tank of fuel (50 litres) every 2 weeks. the average home brew setup is 25 litres or so, there is 50% ethanol for 2 weeks right there.

i wasn't going to run pure alcoholl. well i'm not going to run any alcohol at all. its just a thought that i realise i'm not the first person to think about it, but i do have a slight advantage with the tuning respect. and yes, alcohol at any percentage should really be tuned differently. both timing and fuel maps. what i meant when i said alcohol injection was something like this:

http://autoxcooper.com/devils_own.php

but its normally water/meth.. was wondering if ethanol would work in replacement of methanol.

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Offline Cheezel

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Re: has anyone considered diy ethanol blends?
« Reply #4 on: Sep 13, 2011, 03:16PM »
Ah, i forgot you know a fair bit about water. Plumbing, too, correct? :D sorry

Youre fuel consumption will increase, dont forget, but you're right. It's probably still 25litres for 1.5 weeks (use 30~40% more ethanol compared to fuel run at a 1:1 ratio). What's the filtration and production time? I'd imagine producing 25litres of ethanol a week would be pushing it a lot?

Chemistry isn't my strong point, but i remember methanol takes a little more to combust than ethanol. It's also a little more toxic, obviously...
If you could tune it I don't see why you couldn't use ethanol instead... It's just one more carbon and hydrogen atom. :D They both have almost identical properties in water, as well.

Offline SSS

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Re: has anyone considered diy ethanol blends?
« Reply #5 on: Sep 13, 2011, 10:57PM »
My wife will kill me if I start distilling E85.

Offline Cheezel

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Re: has anyone considered diy ethanol blends?
« Reply #6 on: Sep 13, 2011, 11:55PM »
My wife will kill me if I start distilling E85.
Do it Adam, you know you want to... A wife, or shave a second off your quarter mile time? :D

Offline crazy2287

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Re: has anyone considered diy ethanol blends?
« Reply #7 on: Sep 14, 2011, 01:00AM »
I might be missing something but from what i understand it's just simply not financially viable. Although what sort of distilling are you talking about? A reflux still will remove 99% of impurities. the stuff you get form the bowser is gonna have more in it then that. but the costs on materials to produce the ethanol to still. can simply use sugar water and a yeast bug but the sugar cost alone would likely blow your budget.
there are a few things about ethanol fuel to remember. Not 100% on these so im open to corrections.
The reason you use more is because it has a lower energy per unit and stoichiometric ratio. You need a larger quantity to produce the most economical burn. Methanol is even lower: Methanol, 6.4; Ethanol, 9.0; petrol, 14.7. to put this better in perspective fuel usage will be roughly 17ltr per 100km instead of just 10ltr. this isnt to do with the fuel been on poor "economy" it is just the required fuel to air ratio for the fuel to be most efficient.
The bonus is due to the increase of liquid in the combustion chamber becoming gaseous, cylinder temperatures are reduced, coupled with the higher octane rating of ethanol means more timing can be ran safely without detonation. and more expansion during compustion giving a more powerful stroke. Total power output is increased. Assuming you have tuned the car to run ethanol properly you would use less throttle at cruise to maintain speed so you might only be 14-15ltr per 100km.

Ethanol mixes with water, it will absorb it form the air. You have to add a corrosion inhibitor if you want to use it as fuel, it will also need to be stored in airtight containers to prevent it spoiling.
I priced it per 200ltr drum about a year ago as i was going to make my own ethanol blend for performance reasons, but the cost was about $300 per drum. this came with the corrosion inhibitor.


in short to answer your original question, In my opinion:
No it's not viable to run a daily.
Can it be done without impurities? Yes, you should be able to easily enough produce ethanol to a purity >98%
It could be used as an "alcohol injection" to ward off detonation although straight filtered water would be a better option. The reason they add the alcohol was originally in aviation, to stop the water freezing at altitude.

While not necessarily financially economical, i think i could produce 10 liters a week once it was established. would take a lot of time out of your week.
I recon you could use 1x30 ltr tunn full with water, with 5-8kg of sugar (estimate) and brewed with a wine yeast with a good alc tolerance. ferment at 30ÂșC for 14 days to ~17-20% alc.
Have 2 of these setup, staggered so you have one completed batch every weekend.
double distill through a reflux still for good measure, discarding heads and tails you'll get about 5 litres.

So Double the tuns to 60 ltr batches.

you'd pretty much spent your entire weekend stilling....
« Last Edit: Sep 14, 2011, 01:05AM by crazy2287 »
I drive like i screw..... illegally =D... wait O.o WHAT?? O.O

Offline mendezcr

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Re: has anyone considered diy ethanol blends?
« Reply #8 on: Sep 14, 2011, 11:25AM »
 :o ......   :P .....  :-\ ....  ??? .... thats all I can say.....  8)

Offline noss

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Re: has anyone considered diy ethanol blends?
« Reply #9 on: Sep 14, 2011, 03:08PM »
people do it viably financially in the usa. the cost of sugar may be different here because the cost of everything here is ridiculous in comparisson to overseas. alcohol injection would be used to increase octane (would be water/ethanol mix) and also progressively adjust timing to suit.

also i drive a mini so the litres/100 are out a bit :P

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Offline Cheezel

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Re: has anyone considered diy ethanol blends?
« Reply #10 on: Sep 14, 2011, 03:36PM »
also i drive a mini so the litres/100 are out a bit :P
Unfortunately there's no standardised unit of "smell of an oily rag", so you can't convert to litres easily. :D

I guess at the end of it all I can think is "for the time and effort i'd be putting in, and the outlay/cost of materials, at no stage would i break even". So in that sense I wouldn't do it. If you don't have that sort of an outlook, or you have more free time than me, go for it! "Uncle Noss' Ethanol blend" has a bit of a ring to it, doesn't it? :D

Offline crazy2287

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Re: has anyone considered diy ethanol blends?
« Reply #11 on: Sep 14, 2011, 04:10PM »
I checked my emails while at work today, the price i was quoted for the ethanol with inhibitor was $500 per barrel >.o

You could make a regular still out of 2 bathtubs, a bag of flour, some copper pipe and a 40ltr thinners drum, couple doz bricks and a few bbq burners. if you could salvage most of it from the tip you could set up for relativity cheap <$100 and have something suitable to rip 100ltrs down to ~70-80% ethanol relativity quickly. that way you'd have a much more manageable quantity (~35ltr) for the reflux still

I'm just using round figures so the maths is eazyer. Sugar is about $1.50 a kg? There's a real possibility that you could source it much cheaper if you had the proper contacts. buy a pallet of contaminated stock. who cares as long as the yeast can consume it. natural sugars in fruit will work too, but you will have to supplement with sugar to have enough to reach 15-20% alc and then you have to deal with transport of the bulk fruit, and waste material and more contaminates.
« Last Edit: Sep 14, 2011, 04:32PM by crazy2287 »
I drive like i screw..... illegally =D... wait O.o WHAT?? O.O