Your experiment is very interesting. I am curious, if that was a one
time event, or if you have used that fuel mixture for any length of
time. If so, I would be interested in a report on the internal condition
of the engine.
Just a thought; but I would caution anyone thinking about trying this,
to consider that no mass produced engine currently on the market is
designed for that mixture of fuel. While it may run, it may not run for
long if major corrosion sets up in critical operating systems. It would
pretty well defeat the pupose, if it reduced the life of the engine to a
fraction of what it was designed for.
I certainly wouldn't try that in the engine of a car. The fuel mixture
is very critical to injected engines. Besides the possability of spark
plug fouling, and valve deposits, the exhaust systems on contemporary
automobiles would probably just shut down in a matter of minutes in
reaction to having to deal with that much water vapor.
If the parts of an engine, which are adversely affected were made of the
right materials, we might have a shot at fine tuning engine operation to
a specific fuel mixture.
I also had the thought, that there probably are surfactants, which might
be better suited to the purpose, for keeping that sort of fuel mixture
in solution.
SWB
________________________________________________________________________--
Peter Harris wrote:
>
> Hi all
> Back in Febuary when this thread was running, I tried an experiment
> with my lawn mower. I took two parts petrol (gas for our US readers)
> and one part water and mixed them in a glass jar. Sure enough they
> immediately separated, I added regular shop bought liquid dish washing
> liquid (Palmolive concentrated) squirt by squirt until shaking
> yielded a grey emulsion which consumed all the water. I poured this
> into the dry tank of my unmodified four stroke lawn mower, pressed
> the priming pump three times as recommended and pulled the starter.
> Lo and behold the dam thing started! I mowed my front lawn on this
> mixture, I noticed no change in performance over running on 100%
> petrol.
>
> I was talking to my father that evening about this and he was
> reminded of racing motorcycles back in the 1940/50s, these were run on
> a mixture of wood alcohol and water, no mention of catalysts.
>
> As my mower ran without the addition of a catylist, I suspect that
> the water rather than fracturing into H2 & O2 was simply expanding to
> steam by consuming waste heat in the cylinder thus my engine was
> running partially as a steam engine. I suspect that this is a more
> effective use of petrol as energy that is normally wasted as heat is
> converted into useful mechanical energy.
>
> The emulsion described above is unstable, separation in the jar was
> noticable within a minute, the fuel tank on my mower is attached to
> the body of the engine and thus is subjected to sufficient vibration
> to maintain the emulsion while the mower is running.
>
> It may not be free, but it should burn less fuel and put less heat
> into the environment.
>
> Peter
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> To leave this list, email <listserver@keelynet.com>
> with the body text: leave Interact
> list archives and on line subscription forms are at
> http://keelynet.com/interact/
> -------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------
To leave this list, email <listserver@keelynet.com>
with the body text: leave Interact
list archives and on line subscription forms are at
http://keelynet.com/interact/
-------------------------------------------------------------