This morning after I returned from working at the store, I was firing up my laptop when I paused to listen to some commentary on KGLO AM 1300 here in Mason City, which broadcasts most of the radio programming I listen to these days.
Presumably an item found on the Internet, the morning show host filling in for the day shared a juicy tidbit about beet juice being added to salt brine for use as a road de-icer in Cincinnatti, OH.
Naturally, the question arised:
HOW ON EARTH DID SOMEONE THINK TO USE BEET JUICE TO MELT ICE?
The first rumination was that it was university researchers. A caller to the studio speculated that a woman might have serendipitously discovered the phenomenon after slipping on the ice with a bag full of groceries and breaking or rupturing a can of beets and noticing the effect it had on the ice underfoot.
Another station personality was in the studio, and he reflected on how anyone would have ever decided to try to turn corn into fuel once upon a time...
Ethyl alcohol is interesting stuff, and most of the gasoline sold here in Iowa, like at least eighty percent of it, contains ten percent alcohol in it. Federal law now requires that by 2012 or so, something like 36 million gallons of alcohol be utilized as motor vehicle fuel annually. All right, fair enough.
The headline of the Mason City Globe Gazette today states in bold letters that a three billion dollar pipeline is proposed, and Mason City would possibly be a location for a 'hub' in the network, given the proximity the city has to a number of local ethanol plants. Two producers are working jointly on this project, citing the need for feasability studies, further technical research, and federal government loan guarantees. They project that the system may be operative in three or four years if all goes well, piping ethanol out to the east coast. Less than a year ago, a facility of startling size was built just ten miles north of here, that serves as a marshalling yard of sorts for the stuff. Trucks and rail cars load and unload alcohol at all hours, and the storage capacity in the tanks is in the millions of gallons.
Ethanol has a few things going for it, and a lot of complaints against it. Let's take a look:
1) Renewable resource? Absolutely! 'Zero point' type energy? Of course not; far from it. Yes, it is ultimately solar power. So is coal and oil, and the electricity or light and heat derived from coal and oil are. The sun provided the energy millions of years ago when the (mostly) plants and (some) animals that fossil fuels are derived from lived. If not for the sun, the earth would be an inert rock in space, if it even would be here in the first place if not for the sun. Since that was about five billion years back, I guess exactly how you believe the actual mechanics of the creation of the earth is entirely up to you. I personally don't give it much thought as it's water under the bridge, but most scientific types I've ever met do believe that planets of the solar system did come from the sun. Why they would have formed that way is where one's faith comes in! If we can get to the point where it's practical to derive alcohol from garbage and grasses, we'll be good. Most of us know that corn isn't the ideal source for alcohol, but it's not bad and it's what we were geard toward in the modern USA. Sugar cane or beet is better by far, but we don't grow a lot of that around here. Sugar beet used to be big in north Iowa, and we had a Crystal Sugar plant north of Mason City for many years, but it was very labor intensive and the Mexican laborers who did all the field work moved on decades ago. Of corse, they're back now, so to speak, but the factory is gone and what's left is just a storage facility.
2) Some people complain about the performance of alcohol. Yes, there are issues. The only real one most of us need to keep in mind is that alcohol is a very good solvent. If you use ethanol E10 blend regularly, you'll have no problems. If you seldom use it, you're going to have some trouble when you do because it often dissolves any varnish or other 'gunk' in your fuel tank and sends it through the line, where the suspended 'icky stuff' clogs your fuel filter. Not good. Ethanol does, however, absorb and hold water. Water is common in the bottom of fuel tanks, mostly due to condensation. It's heavier than gasoline, so it drips from the top and sides of the tank, and rolls to the bottom, displacing the gasoline. Use ethanol, and the water is absorbed and burned with the gasoline. Neat, huh? Yes, but not new. Have you ever seen HEET brand and similar fuel line anti-freezes? Guess what they are...Put ten gallons of E10 in your tank, and you've got about a gallon of HEET in your tank and little to no (and sometimes even less) cost, versus buying a pint bottle of fuel line antifreeze. That's what's neat!
E10 is rated at 89 octane, typically. Standard unleaded is normally rated at 87. Truth is, alcohol by itself has considerable octane equivalence because it isn't very volatile. You do not add 10 percent alcohol to 87 octane unleaded to get 89 octane E10. You start with gasoline base stock with about a 60 or 70 octane rating and alcohol to get 89.
Does anyone reading this recall the days of the muscle cars? Back when almost anything you could buy could be had with a big block V-8 engine stuffed between the frame rails? Yeah. To get a lot of horsepower, displacement is not the answer. A big engine will deliver a lot of torque, or twisting power. Some of the early cars actually had enormous engines, some of up to a thousand cubic inches or more, although five or six hundred was not unusual. We're going back to the early 1900's here. Yet, those cars often could barely top 80mph. Part of it was weight and aerodynamics; a lot of those cars were huge tanks. No, I'm not talking the Model T Ford. I'm talking the Rolls-Royces and other top-end rides of the era. In those days, once gasoline became widespread, 80 octane was considered 'hot stuff' and the compression ratios, the real power factor in an engine, were extremely mild, like sometimes only 4 or 5 to 1. 'Normal' compression ratios for the last 30-35 years have been between 8:1 and 9:1. Anything truly high perfomance was going to have more like a 10:1 or 11:1 ratio. When the piston was at the bottom of its intake stroke in the cylinder, just when both valves were closed, it would begin its ascent and squeeze the fuel mist and air into ONE TENTH or less of the space before a spark from the ignition system would ignite it, jamming the piston to the bottom of its travel in the cylinder bore with a force of hundreds of pounds. When you compress air (which is most of what your car is burning, by the way, with about 15 parts air and 1 part gasoline) by a factor of ten times, something happens. It gets HOT! The more you squeeze it together, the hotter it gets. In a high compression engine, if you used 'regular' gasoline, it was likely to ignite from the heat of compression before the correctly timed spark from the ignition system ignited it. This is known as 'detonation', 'knock', or 'ping', and it's not only inefficient but can be very harmful to an engine. To prevent knock, you need gasoline that doesn't burn as easily, that has a higher octane rating. Part of the demise of the muscle cars: a barrel of crude oil generally yields less of the high-octane 'premium' fuel than it does the lesser octane gasoline. This is one of several reasons why pretty much all cars built and sold for the 1972 model year and later had compression ratios of 9:1 or less. Fine, but what do you do with all the really 'poor' gasoline that evaporates with extaordinary ease? Hmmmm.....blend it with alcohol and sell it as 89 octane E10 and it can be utilized, stretching the gasoline inventories out so there's enough to go around.
Racers often drive cars that run on nearly straight alcohol. It could be mixed with something else, and it almost always will contain at least a bit of moisture, which seems inevitable with alcohol. A considerable portion of the distilling process is removing the moisture, and it isn't easy! Why alcohol? Easy. The race cars running 'Alky' often have compression ratios of 12 to 15 to 1 or more. You'd need to have something like 120 octane gasoline for that engine to run well and not blow itself apart from premature ignition. Guess what? Yeah, that's right: alcohol has that high octane equivalency rating. So why doesn't it seem to do so well in our cars? Because our cars are built for gasoline. Your car would also get very poor mileage and output if you put kerosene or diesel fuel in the tank, too. Kerosene is what jets normally run on, and diesel engines, which do not have spark plugs but actually RELY on the heat of compression to ignite their fuel, are typically designed with a compression ratio of up to and over 20:1. In fact, diesel fuel is really light oil. It doesn't vaporize like gasoline does. The truth is, if you're going to run your vehicle on gasoline at all, you'll never do well with alcohol. You can have a machine shop build your engine up to be super on alcohol. Problem is, you'll be limited to alcohol. Run gasoline, and you'll be in sorry shape very quickly. Modern electronics allow engine management computers that can tweak the tuning of your engine to accommodate both fuels, but that's pretty much done through ignition timing; delaying or advancing the precise point in the engine's power cycle when the spark plug fires. Changing the compression ratio means physically altering the volume of the cylinder when the piston is bottomed out, and the volume of the resulting combustion chamber when the piston is at Top Dead Center. Hot rodders have long increased the compression ratio by reducing the combustion chamber volume by milling a few hundredths of an inch from the bottom of the cylinder heads or replacing the stock pistons with aftermarket ones featuring domed tops. A computer that could do that on a whim is something I'd like to see!
3) If we get to the point where alcohol blends, specifically E85, are available as widely as gasoline is, you could probably have an engine with a 12:1 compression ratio run quite well and very efficiently on the stuff.
So, now, for the real question that came up:
How did anyone ever think to use corn to fuel a car?
Ethanol has been around far longer than the automobile has, my friend!
Humankind has been drinking the stuff for centuries. In the bad old days, you only drank the water in many places if you'd had enough of this cruel old world. And I assure you, what you often contracted from the water was not a fast nor easy way to die. Wine was divine. Vinegar was often consumed, too, but was not all that desirable. Liquor was a safe bet, and drinking 'hard stuff' was a fact of life in most places if you wanted to live very long at all. Did your kids drink beer? Absolutely. Otherwise, they'd never live long enough to be anything but children.
The first reciprocating piston engines were external combustion type and ran on steam, generated by boiling water somewhere outside the engine and piping it in to do the work. Ships and trains used this system, and, yes, a few early cars did, too. Internal combustion reciprocating piston engines needed a liquid fuel that could be burned to transform it from liquid into pressurized hot gas that acted directly against the piston. Kerosene was used for heating, oil was around, but mostly it was considered a nuisance wherever it happened to push its way to the surface. No one thought to utilize it as motor fuel for surprisingly quite a while. The first internal combustion reciprocating engines ran on: alcohol. What did Henry Ford design his Tin Lizzie to run on, primarily? Alcohol. Gasoline was invented somewhat later on and proved to be a more practical power source, thus it took over. Still, back in the 20's and 30's, there were a heck of a lot of rural dwellers who distilled thier own motor fuel from what they grew. It cost them a lot less than purchasing gasoline did, and they could do it at home out on the farm. Out in the boonies back then, sometimes getting gasoline wasn't the easiest thing in the world.
Things to think about,
the TiGor
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