Not a stupid question.. see if your car only runs 10-12 PSI boost.. a 2 bar is fine. You want for the sensor to add or take away alcohol. On my car running close to 30, a 2 bar at 15 PSI. is done. Hence the 3 bar. Havent found a 4 bar yet

If you run an SC, you can use a 2 bar sensor, pump, nozzle, lines, tank, and controller. Its not rocket science..thats the good news. And alcohol when pumping it in, is extremely forgiving. If you shoot too much the motor lays down, but no harm. Its not like a fuel injector where your looking for a perfect number/flow.

 

Mike, heres an easy answer. See if your motor is detonating and you shoot some alcohol into the cylinder, the detonation goes away.

If your detonating and you shoot some NOS into the cylinder.. your crankshaft goes away. See NOS makes power but it by far has no detonation reduction properties like water/alcohol injection. yes it cooler till it hits the back of the valve, one inside the chamber..kaboom.. hence why added octane is needed with NOS. If not everbody could run a 250 shot on 87 octane.

Now to play with ideas, hydrogen peroxide, acetone are two others..

I'll stick to whats worked for so many, and keep my smiles per gallon high.

 

Where do you guys get the alcohol???

is a 50/50 mix the best bet for street?

 

The alcohol in question is Methanol I presume. It is also known as Methyl Hydrate ... CH3OH ... it is oxygenated, but it burns. When added to the fuel air mixture, it will richen the mixture up. N2O on the other hand while still being an oxygenated compound, does not burn, when added to the air fuel mixture, it will lean the mixture out.

They both will cool the intake charge, though which cools better I suppose would depend on the amount used ??

Hope this add a bit more light

LWM

 

Just got my meth kit on the other day and it is badass! Dropped intake temps 70 degrees with small nozzle and 50/50 mixture...

Used my wiper fluid res as the tank...

 

I'm curious...

How many miles per gallon do you get with alcohol injection?


Let me clarify what I mean so you don't misunderstand.

Lets say I built a turbocharged engine, ran 20lbs of boost and used alcohol injection to control temperature/detonation.

Lets also say that I had a one gallon resevoir to hold the alcohol being used for injection.

If I wanted to take the car out for a drive one fine Saturday, how long could I expect to drive on that one gallon of alcohol before I would need to refill the resevoir?

 

Depends on the injection rate and how often it's activated (obviously). Mine is set up to activate a 3psi of boost at a flow rate of ~15gph. Since I seldom see 3psi except at WOT, with a 1gal reservoir you could think of it as 4min at WOT - a long time for a powerful car.

You can buy methanol at most paint stores or hardwares. If they don't have it, they should be able to get it. Washer fluid will work as well.

Rich Krause

 

I had been running water/alcohol mixes and straight alcohol for the last 3 years on my supercharged 98 ls1 TA.
Non intercooled and running from 15-20GPH nozzles.
A 15GPH nozzle with straight alcohol injected at 140psi directly after the blower output, only dropped charge temps to 160-170' on a 50' day while seeing about 14psi boost.
This is a over spun G -trim Vortech.
Needed to be run at around 10.7-11.0 AF for no detonation even with 100 octane CAM 2 pump gas.

I had some left over A.C. parts and fabbed up a water to air intercooler using an A.C. evaporator core and removed the alky injection. Peak IAT at full boost on a 65' day is now 118' day at 13 psi with the fabbed up intercooler. Lost 1 lb of boost with the intercooler and dropped temps about 50 degrees with no alky.

Have not yet run the car and probably won't ever have a direct comparison as I'm installing a new rear-end and different gears right now.
But SOTP tells me it's about the same speed, yet the intercooled combo has proven much less liable to detonate than the non intercooled alky combo.
I had used from 1 to 4 nozzles and injected it at many different locations including through the blower. Yes, water will work fine without alky but you lose a lot of power when you get the flow high enough with straight water to stop all detonation with an aggressive timing table.
Most of the tractor pullers using water injection are diesels.

some pics of old and new combos here. I think in the old combo photos I did not have the alky system hooked up at the time.
http://community.webshots.com/user/s_j_h

Steve

 

It has been shown that water, up to 70% by wgt., (50% by volume) can/has been used in the combustion process. This was accomplished without an APPARENT lose of power (gasoline engine). With your experience, this done not appear to agree. It has also been shown, that with the addition of enuf water, the fuel requirement can be reduced, without accompanying lose of power. Is this to imply that the engine/power response, when water is added, will take of the EFFECT of experiencing too rich an A/F ratio, if the amount of fuel is not reduced? although my logic would imply no. Did you alter the amount of fuel used, when water was used in conjunction? Could/would the power lose you experienced, have been reclaimed, with an attending adjustment of fuel flow? Personally, would not attempt, under for power, without monitoring detonation and EGTs.

 

I think in the last 3 years I have read every old and new SAE and naca paper on the subject of auxiliary fuels and combustion coolants on the net.
Just as an experiment as I knew I was pulling the motor soon,
I ran enough water through this thing once it would not rev beyond 4500rpm and the valve covers were full of condensate after a few seconds.
It was way more than the total fuel volume used.
I have an in car wideband and good pcm monitoring software.
I use ls1edit to tune the pcm. Yes, I pulled back the fueling. Never leaner than 12.5-1 though.
Also the thing about charge cooling. Tell you what, guys who see a huge drop in temps, make darn sure your sensor is not to close to the nozzles or you'll just end up wetting the sensor and measuring the temp of the fluid! I used to think I had great charge temp reduction until I moved the nozzles way back from the temp sensor.

The thing is as (Chris B already pointed out), water is able to get you more power than without with marginal pump gas.
However, water is not comparable to the same tune-up using a pure fuel that has sufficient octane to stop detonation.
In other words, run 20psi at a 12:1 AF with 114 octane and 25' timing.
run the same 20psi and 12:1 AF with 93 pump gas and 50% by volume of water and 25' timing.
The water injected engine will be down on power because of the thermal losses.
Don't get me wrong. Used both water an alky for last 3 years. It DOES work. But it's not a miracle either.
Going back to the original question of this thread, right now I think intercooling may be a better approach if it's choose one or the other. Of course you could do both.
Steve