Do you think This Corn gas they want to create will work well on planes?

Answer 1

AGE85 is already in production and STCd for some aircraft and seems to be working well. But, like other projects that should have started 25 or 30 years ago the cost is high.

http://www.age85.org/

Answer 2

Ethanol will work great as a fuel for planes.

Michael C. is just wrong. You can run turbines on just about anything that burns from Natural gas, hydrogen, methane, to Gasoline (petrol), Kerosene, etc. You obviously have to re-fit the combustion chamber for these "alternate" fuels but is done all the time for specific purpose engines.

There was a guy putting 100% eethanol in his stunt plane back in the 80's (can't remember who he was).
http://www.ethanol360.com/weblogs/
This article has another stunt plane and other plane information at the bottom.

http://sustainabledesignupdate.com/?cat=8
(another interesting article)

But as far as production costs (and eenergy); If it isn't efficient to produce how does Brazil do it? They are like 99% energy self sufficient using ethanol from sugar cane (not the best source either).

Just think of the idiots in Nigeria, the middle east, and Venezuela that would be powerless if we weren't sending them all of our money!

When I was a kid I used to run Methanol (close cousin) in my R/C planes, helicopters, and cars all the time. We are much closer to this goal than people want to believe.

Answer 3

bostonianinmo makes many good points. i will however dispute one and that is the gasoline has better power potential than alcohol. to an extent he is correct, as long as combustion chamber pressures do not exceed the octane limits of gasoline. once that happens, you actually lose power from detonation, as well as causing engine damage. with diesel and other kerosene based fuels you run into the problem of high exhaust temperatures, which also causes damage. this is where alcohol has the advantage. it has a naturally high octane rating, which can easily be increased, and the exhaust temperatures remain reasonably low since alcohol burns colder than other fuels. as for power potential, you need not look any further than top alcohol funny cars and dragsters(NOT the top fuel cars). they make something on the order of 4500-5000hp from 500 cubic inch engines, and because they run alcohol, they are easy on parts. this does come at a price though, and that is fuel consumption. a top alcohol car burns about 10-12 gallons of fuel for one 1/4 mile, including the burn out and staging. indy cars average about 1.8 miles per gallon at race speeds while making around 700hp. using alcohol requires much higher fuel flow rates than other fuels do. and that being the case, you either need to carry more fuel in an aircraft, or reduce its range. depending o the aircraft and what it is used for, both options can be undesirable.

Answer 4

Corn-based ethanol already exists, just go to a gas station in one of the middle states. I'm not sure it's has the capabilities to work for a jet engine, at least not yet.

Answer 5

Reworking a turbine engine to burn something other than jet fuel (kerosene) is pretty simple. I took part in a USAF study many years ago that had us testing diesel engines on jet fuel as well as a number of alternative fuels on turbines.

The diesels ran great on jet fuel. So well in fact that GM, Caterpillar and Cummins all honored their warranties when using jet fuel. No mods were needed at all and the "green slime" problem with diesel fuel tanks when water gets into them disappeared with the jet fuel.

The turbines were a bit trickier. We tested various turboshaft and jet engines with gasoline, diesel, ethyl alcohol and even peanut oil. We had to work on the fuel pressure settings and the nozzle patterns but for the most part they all ran very well pretty much regardless of what we threw at them. All of the turbine testing was done in a test cell environment for safety reasons as well as to get some good data on power output and fuel consumption.

As far as power output was concerned, diesel and peanut oil were the best, followed by gasoline with ethyl alcohol a distant 4th place. The problem with ethyl alcohol is its lower BTU content. There's a lot less potential energy in a gallon of alcohol so you either have to burn a LOT more of it to get from point A to point B or you have to live with much lower overall performance. That is likely to be the biggest impediment to using alcohol in an aircraft turbine engine.

Bio-diesel would work quite well, however, with only minimal modifications of the fuel systems required. And the exhaust smells like microwave popcorn!

Answer 6

first of all you can make alcohol out of just about anything, so yes it will work..
the problem i have with it is price of gas higher because the corn use, milk off the chart because corn prices are high, beef higher, everything is up because of the corn fuel deal which i think the oil people are up to. there is plenty of corn being grown, it just another bull **** issue caused by the oil industries

Answer 7

Although I do appreciate the effort being put into biofuels, ethyl alcohol is not the answer. It takes more energy to produce it than it will ever return, and the yield is very low per acre.
The truly promising area of biofuel research is in genetically engineering custom crops to produce a high-yield fuel that requires little processing.

Answer 8

In a jet engine, the modification is simple, just bigger nozzles on the fuel injectors.

In a piston engine, I'm afraid the octane rating will be too low.

Answer 9

Honey, ethanol (corn fuel) has been around since the 70's, it just hasn't been distributed due to pressure by the oil interests world wide.

As to whether it would work on airplanes, they require special fuel with additives. I don't see why you couldn't use the ethanol as a base.

Answer 10

I'm assuming you mean ethanol. The answer is no. Jet fuel is closer to kerosene.