Has anyone experimented with it? I saw a video from the 80's that said Mazda raced the Periport IMSA cars with a 50/50 Gasoline kerosene blend. Aparently Kerosene has the capability to make more power than gasoline, but has a very low octane rating. But, because of the low liklyhood of NA rotaries to detonat, they make a prime canidate for kerosene. I was wondering if anyone has tried it out and if so what results were. Maybe this could help get me over the 200whp hump.

 

you may be correct, makes sense, give it a try!!

i dont see how you would hurt the engine,, the hotter the engine gets ,better it would run on kerosene, ford Model Ts could run on kero, after they warmed up to temp. worked well in hot summers.

 

if the kero works, in N/As, 50/50.
you may go to diesel fuel it has more energy than kero, and recently they have some additves for diesel fuel ,supposed to add 15% hp.

just some input in the idea!! N/A is pretty tough motors

 

This is very interesting im glad i read this,i am very curious in the difference in horse power between 50/50 kero or the 50/50 diesel....

 

anyone have the following information on Kerosene? or is it safe to use the values i got jet fuel which are in parentheses.

1. flash point (38*C)
2. autoignition temperature (210*C)
3. specific energy (43.15 MJ/Kg)
4. open air burning temperature (287.5*C)
5. freezing point (-47*C)

thanks.

 

in a diesel engine you lose about 5% hp with kero. compared to diesel fuel,ULSD. like i said they have come up with some real good additives for diesel(its about time).

Jet 1-JetA, is close to kero, but someplace on the net are numbers, for a lot of fuels.

best part!! diesel costs about 1/2 less than kero.

 

yeah, i checked a few sites on the kerosene numbers before i posted. the only things i got that were of use were:

flash point = 37*C-65*C (i suppose that depends on pressure)
autoignition temperature = 220*C

and one site approximated the specific energy to be ~11 KWh/Kg (i'll try to go about converting that MJ/Kg at some point). it just seemed hard to find as much info on regular Kerosene as i could on jet fuel. i also learned that there are at least 2 types for sale to the general public: a clear type and a red type. i must admit, had it not been for this thread, i probably wouldn't have bothered reading up on Kero.

 

Yeah, locally kerosene is about $3.60/gallon, Diesel is about $2.99/gallon, 87 is $2.39/gallon.

So unless it's a performance advantage, then why bother?

OTOH if you have a method of brewing biodiesel then it may be a neat idea.

 

Well cost is in no way an issue. The whole point is to get every last drop of extra power out of the engine that is possible. I'm talking about race applications.

 

What is the flame front speed?

I forgot where I was reading it, but I recently read an article where an engine builder said that for pump gas, don't bother trying to make the powerband any higher than 8000rpm because pump gas doesn't burn quickly enough at those speeds.

 

Call me skeptical,but that article you read i think is B.S and i might be wrong.but the reason im skeptical of this 8,000rpm Flame front limit is the fact that Formula one engines can easily and have reached engine rpm's as high as 22,000 rpm's while using a slightly refind version of pump gas....

but im curious of kero's flame front????

 

i'm a bit hesitant to buy that, too - without even taking it as extreme as an F1 engine. i remember reading about a few Honda build builds that were taking RPM into the lower 5-digit range with gasoline. i can't speak as to the octane rating they used, but it was gasoline.

 

Diesel burns slower than gas. I read somewhere there is no reason to spin a diesel passed about 5500 rpm because it doesn't have time to burn.

I've been making biodiesel for a few years so cost wise it would be great. Right now with the price of methanol where it is it costs me about .48 a gallon to make.

 

yes, diesel does burn slower than gas, but it has enough energy to push the rotor for a longer expansion period,= torque.

also until some one starts experimenting we dont know what will happen, and i dont think it can hurt the engine.

around here gas reg, cost 2.59 gal,, diesel same 2.59 gal, methenol around 5.00 gal, if you can find it with out runnin all over the county,, race 110, 12.00 gal.

course we got one E-85 station but 20mile away.

and IMO a low boost turbo, is way better if you need more power! on an NA

 

also try to make more torque, and not so much more RPM.
my torque will get me ahead of you, off the corner, and by the time you got your rpm wound up, we back into another corner and on the brakes.

and any body who drag races knows torque is king.

 

We're also talking about engines with bores and strokes such that a F1 engine's piston would rattle-fit in there with the head bolted down, and a non centrally located spark plug.

Getting the fire to burn completely is a big problem in F1 too, don't get me wrong. But the context needs to be understood. Clearly it cannot be applied to all engines, several million motorcycles would disagree. But they have wee teeny tiny bores and even tinier strokes, so the ends of the chamber are never very far from the spark plug.

Now, how large is a rotary's combustion chamber? Freakin' huge, isn't it?

After reading that statement, I started thinking about maybe experimenting with race fuel or at the very least playing with toluene.

 

peejay's on the right track, the elf fuels in F1 about 15 years ago were said to be worth about 80hp. The problem was you didn't want to be the guy following one of those cars because of the fumes. The fuels passed the 'gasoline' tests but were closer to liquid plastic and toluene was part of the mix.

 

comon guys ,,like i said on another thread , if your gonna run a super fuel,,GO NITROMETHANE,, all the other stuff is a joke when you need torque per volume of liquid.

youall thinkin to close to the box,, STEP UP.

 

Sure, nitromethane, great. It's expensive, difficult to handle, turns into an explosive in storage, and you need to change your oil before every time you start the engine. Sounds like a plan!

 

... and god forbid you also garden for a hobby, then you'll have Feds at your door every week. Yea!

no, but seriously, i did some reading on nitromethane and it is rather intriguing as a fuel. 25% the energy density of gas, yet 200 to 300% the energy output. un-bloody-believable! crazy combustion temperatures! doesn't REQUIRE the amount of air gas does (though more air does enhance its potency). i can see its merits.

on the other hand, i can only imagine what it would do a motor in a detonation event. can't promise i'd break the line to try it, but i think i'd give it a go someday if i ran out of experiments.

 

Found this Nitro Rotary or that's what the title claims on youtube. Looks bad *** though check it out


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc4x2...eature=related

 

That's only part of it. A major reason they don't rev very high is due to not being able to advance the flame front, because it uses compression ignition. How fast a fuel burns can be compensated by ignition timing, to an extent.

About nitromethane, I remember reading some big drag guys saying that they had tried it, but because of the rotary's combustion chamber and nitromethane's long burning time, it couldn't be advanced enough to make use of the fuel's potential. Definitely may be worth a try though! If nothing else, I think nitro may work on a less aggressively ported, less overlap N/A engine with lots of ignition advance.

Early F1 turbo cars used an 85+% toluene mix, with some lubricant additives and something else to reduce octane due to regulations. Toluene is found in every day fuel, and the only difference between it and pump fuel (other than ethanol and other additives) is octane. Toluene is about 114 octane, and xylene, another near identical fuel is 117 octane. I'm planning on making some home brew next spring, never thought about kerosene/diesel though.

Edit: Just did some searching on diesel and kerosene, they have octane ratings in the 15 to 25 rating, because they are designed to ignite very easily (by compression) and as such, are not very resistant to knock. I'm not sure how much of a benefit they would be when mixed, because although they have higher energy content, you will be losing your resilience to knock, and won't be able to take advantage of higher ignition advance. Maybe in N/A if it was mixed with really high octane blends to even out, tho I still don't know if it would really be worthwhile. Even mixed 50/50 with xylene @ 117 octane, you'd net 71 octane, I don't know if that would be enough to run your engine at 9k RPM and lots of advance.

 

Octane doesn't work that way. You can't take a weighted average and say, this is the octane. The only way to determine it is to physically measure it.

Used to be running leaded fuel and unleaded fuel netted a higher octane than either by themselves, because of the interactions between the chemicals.

On that note, I was told that the octane used in IMSA was "80 octane".

 

well at the Daytona race track that IMSA uses, its 104 unleaded. (expensive)

 

top, hoping for new ideas on this.