E85 Bioethanol

As I was near a Morrisons over the weekend, I thought I'd stick a gallon of E85 in (to 10 gallons of V Power already in the tank) to see what happened.

It was a bit irritating filling up as the E85 pump at Ipswich is horrendously slow for some reason, but anyway, EGTs fell 50 degrees and I was able to add 4 degrees timing on boost without any det. The engine felt smoother too.

That was with just 10%, imagine what you could do with 100% E85!

10% Biofuel in petrol only needs 6% lambda enrichment to achieve the same target AFR, so is the safe limit for playing around with. Stronger blends will need bigger injectors and the AFR run at 2 points richer unfortunately, but it's encouraging!

Someone on the DTA forum has had injector O rings, injectors and a pump submersed in E85 for a year and there's been no chemical reaction so far. I know normal ethanol attacks alloy and rots some rubber hoses, but Bioethanol so far seems safe. Happy days!

That's quite interesting, I wonder if you would see such effects on a N/A motor? E85 has a much higher Octane rating does it not?

Yeah, it's a lot higher octane. I've read it's between 109 to 114 depending where you look, so saying it's 110 as an average, that's still 11 more than V power

I should imagine you'll see some sort of gain in a NA motor, if anything much cooler running and cold fuel/air mixes in NA engines generally yields more power. I think I'm right in thinking Bioethanol has more chemically bonded oxygen in it than petrol, so more of bang. You can run a lot more timing too and much higher compression ratio, (which is where most of the power will come from I guess) but the only downside is 12:1 AFR of E85 is about the same as 14.7:1 AFR petrol, so you need to burn a lot more of it do do the same job....but the gains can be higher, so it's swings and roundabouts!