Alternative Fuel E85 Ethanol Corn Gas E70 (Beginner) [MERGED]

[311GSX]

THIS WILL BE RESERVED FOR BEGINNER E85 QUESTIONS, FOR TUNERS THAT HAVE NEVER HEARD OF RUNNING IT OR HAVEN'T RESEARCHED IT YET. THE ADVANCED E85 THREAD IS HERE FOR THE MORE ADVANCED QUESTIONS ---> http://www.dsmtuners.com/forums/newbie-forum/372386-alternative-fuel-e85-ethanol-corn-gas-e70-advanced-merged.html

HOPEFULLY THIS WILL MAKE THE BASIC E85 INFORMATION MORE CENTRALIZED AND EASIER TO FIND FOR THE DSM'rs WHO ARE JUST GETTING THEIR NOSE WET AND ARE UNSURE OF WHAT E85 IS.

THANKS,

GOFER

__________________________________________________​

Has anyone tryed running E85 in their dsm? Their is a station in my area that sells it and it's not much more than regular gas. It is 85% ethanol and 15% gas and is 110 octane . It could be a cheap alternative to race gas.

 

[eclipsh]

I'm sorry, MS ECU? I'm interested in the flex fuel sensor setup. How do you go about this?

 

[JrCRXHF]

I'm sorry, MS ECU? I'm interested in the flex fuel sensor setup. How do you go about this?

MS is for mega Squirt ECU

here is a little link of what has been going on. It is not going to be as easy as DSMlink is but am asking for something that DSM link can not do.

http://www.dsmtuners.com/forums/showthread.php?t=241988

 

[Speedy6963]

Our E85 700whp shop car

http://videos.streetfire.net/video/caff0d6e-a626-4857-b557-994a01341532.htm

 

[tkelly27]

Our E85 700whp shop car

http://videos.streetfire.net/video/caff0d6e-a626-4857-b557-994a01341532.htm

Cars like that and the hybrid lexus with 400hp should be the face of the green movement.

Green means efficient. Efficient means power!

I bring this up often, but the 29c chip could be used with tunerpro. Have the flex fuel sensor swap the maps on the 29c chip. Somethign I'd love to play with if we could have E85 out here. It's race gas you can get at the pump, who cares if you use more of it. Cost wise you must compare it to 110 octane when using it to it's full potential. 110 is something like $5-6 a gallon...

 

[JrCRXHF]

Cars like that and the hybrid lexus with 400hp should be the face of the green movement.

Green means efficient. Efficient means power!

I bring this up often, but the 29c chip could be used with tunerpro. Have the flex fuel sensor swap the maps on the 29c chip. Somethign I'd love to play with if we could have E85 out here. It's race gas you can get at the pump, who cares if you use more of it. Cost wise you must compare it to 110 octane when using it to it's full potential. 110 is something like $5-6 a gallon...

well i guess we are going to try and do flex fuel with MS and the GM sensor but any other way to do it i am cool with too.

 

[Maglin]

Speedy. What is up with the 1-2 shift on that thing. Seems like it was a rich mis-fire to a lean mis-fire on the 2 runs. Nice car.

Tkelly27. With what you are saying about using a 29C256 (which are hard to source these days) or a 29F040 chip wouldn't need a flex fuel sensor. Just wire in a switch and use a bank switcher to change tunes. What the flex fuel sensor does is basicly change the % fuel by the amount of ethanol in the gas.

When I ran E-85 I just changed my injector sizing on my tune. Went from like 1180cc to like 820ish or something like that. I went by my idle AFR and then checked the rest of the tune. Was spot on. Since it's a specific amount of extra fuel needed that is all that is needed to change for the E-85. That requires you to run almost empty on regular gas before filling up with E-85. What Doug wants to do is be able to just add E-85 to say a 1/4 tank of regular gas. Then have the flex fuel sensor do the work for changing fueling requirements. But I think you would still want to change your timing tables so you would want to also hook up a switch to do hardware table switching. I'm pretty sure you can adjust the flex fuel setting to make it a tad leaner.

 

[Chadillac2000]

Well almost had my mind set on the engine setup I was going to put in the drag 1g i'm building, but now after doing a bit of research I'm tossing around the idea of possibly switching up my idea of running an air to water intercooler and instead converting to methanol as fuel and running no IC at all. Looked over at Magnus's site and I could order their 2200cc injectors with their meth fuel rail and a mechanical fuel pump of some type because of the corrosion (or possibly run dual rails with 8 1600cc injectors) But I have a couple of questions that some of you guys may be able to help me out with.

1. If i'm running a fuel cell with all stainless lines from the tank to the rail and using the methanol specific rail and injectors am I going to have to worry about corrosion inside the engine and in the fuel lines?

2. What type of compression ratio would you run on methanol?

3. Would this require constant rebuilds of the engine compared to running gasoline?

Also been looking into ethanol as its not as corrosive but i'm kinda biased towards trying out methanol.

 

[ImportModder]

The only reason you'd worry about methanol corroding the internals is during startup and warmup since that is where you would form formic acid which would start eating away pistons and internals. After the car warms up, it is no big deal. That is why most flex-fuel cars have coated engine internals and an acid neutralizing additive to the oil to protect it against this acid formation. Not really that necessary. I'd only worry about fuel system components that actually see constant contact with the fuel.

You can actually run quite a high compression ratio with methanol. On a naturally aspirated engine, I jumped from a stock 9.2:1 to 13:1 with no problems. I would imagine you could almost run 10:1 without problems depending on how high of boost you plan on running.

You would probably end up rebuilding the engine after the same amount of time as a regular built engine. With just the fuel upgrades, you should see no more wear than a gasoline version. Methanol burns cooler, so you would see lower temps in the combustion chamber.

Ethanol is actually a better fuel for racing. It has more energy than methanol, a higher octane rating, and is less corrosive. The only real reason methanol is more often used is that it is cheaper to produce, so it's less expensive.

 

[Chadillac2000]

ImportModder, thanks for the insight. I might check out getting some custom pistons made that are around 10:1 (need to do some more research as i'll be running around 45-50 psi) and possibly look into running Ethanol instead, as this isn't going to be any type of daily car so the price of gas isn't going to be that much of a factor as its not going to need that much.

I've decided that if I go this route i'm going to run 8 1600cc injectors utilizing two fuel rails and controlled by AEM. Anyone else have any experience?

 

[Devilsown]

Are you wanting to make this your daily driver?

Methanol can't be used daily as it sheads oil. So cylinder wash becomes issues when used constantly. Water/methanol injection systems only run under boost and only are adding a small amount of methanol to the mixture so its not an issue.

Methanol motors do need to be tore down quite often. For a race car this is not to much of an isssue because you should be looking bearings etc for wear pretty regular. I personally tear my motor down ever 20 passes.

Now ethanol. is pretty much compatible with all metals just rubbers fuel lines you need to worry about. Now it takes more ethanol to reach stoch than it does gas. There is a figure for it on the net. Just wanted to make you aware.

 

[Chadillac2000]

No this car will in now way be a daily driver, infact it wont even be seeing the street. This is going to be strictly a drag setup. And yeah through my research I found out that using ethanol or methanol instead of gasoline requires alot more of it, hence possibly running 8 or 10 1600cc injectors. But i'm beginning to lean towards ethanol for the lack of corrosion it causes.

 

[ImportModder]

Are you wanting to make this your daily driver?

Methanol can't be used daily as it sheads oil. So cylinder wash becomes issues when used constantly. Water/methanol injection systems only run under boost and only are adding a small amount of methanol to the mixture so its not an issue.

Methanol motors do need to be tore down quite often. For a race car this is not to much of an isssue because you should be looking bearings etc for wear pretty regular. I personally tear my motor down ever 20 passes.

Now ethanol. is pretty much compatible with all metals just rubbers fuel lines you need to worry about. Now it takes more ethanol to reach stoch than it does gas. There is a figure for it on the net. Just wanted to make you aware.

As far as metal and ethanol, just make sure you have no copper, brass, terne (older gas tanks), zinc, or aluminum as ethanol is not compatible with these metals.

There is also a similar list of polymers that are not compatible with ethanol.

You also have to be aware than ethanol is electrically conductive while regular gasoline fuel is not.

 

[Rick539]

If you are going for a methanol strip car. I would recommend filling the block, then get it bored. Will give more strength to the bottom end. Tap the water jackets in the heads to cool them using an electric water pump.

 

[97MitsuEclipse]

So I've been thinking about switching to E85 and i'm 90% sure I'm going to do it. My reason for switching is that i don't think it'll cost me much and since i have 9.0:1 compression pistons i can't boost over 15psi on pump gas right now. I alredy have a 255lph fuel pump, adjustiable fpr, dsmlink, and i'm going to purchase FIC 1000cc injectors. My question is; should i get a wideband o2? and is there anything i'm forgetting?

 

[griffsfsr]

You don't need a wideband. People have succesfully tuned using the fuel trims. If it was me and I was looking to make the most of the setup while being as safe as I could, I would use a wideband to tune. You can log it with your DSM Link. Also what size turbo are you running? I am sure you have thought of this but you might need slightly larger injectors for the E85.

 

[BK85]

You should check into E85 a little more if you are just looking for lower fuel costs.

According to several reports I've seen on the news, it seems that even though it cost's less, you will get will get lower mpg. So you have to buy more.. resulting in little or no gain dollar wise.

Just a thought.. good luck with your project and keep us informed on the results.

BK85

 

[tristanmb81]

what is E85?

 

[c4uldr0n]

E85 = Ethanol 85%... made from corn and has a higher octane rating closer to race fuel. It is slightly cheaper than standard fuel, but you consume more to get the same amount of work done. I'm still debating if they made it for "Tree Huggers" or "Drag Racers"

 

[cbrfrenzie]

E85 needs much more fuel per unit volume of air to achieve the a stoich afr mixture when compared to gasoline. Stoich for E85 is ~ 9.7:1 where as a stoich afr for gasoline is 14.7:1. This results in much more fuel to get the same efficient burn mixture. Also, since the stoich afr is much lower on E85 you need to start looking at fuel feel line size, injector size as well as fuel pump flow, as your adding about 1.5 times more fuel to get the stoich ratio.

I have a friend with -10 AN feed lines in his Audi 20v turbo with 1000cc injectors and a bosch 044 pump, making 475+awhp, at 30 psi and he is seing duty cycles between 90-95% at WOT full boost. More things to take into consideration.

 

[Skywalker18]

I'll overlook my loss in MPG, for the 105 octane

I run e85. I am running an EVOIII 16G @ 23psi and 18* of timing, I was still tuning for more timing but my alternator belt was slipping, and had ZERO knock. I would definitely recommend getting a wideband if you are going to be tuning it yourself. I have found that e85 is really happy around 12-12.5:1 A/F Ratio. I have run 13:1 on it without knock, but it pulls much better in the 12 range.

My duty cycles are around 75% and that is on 850cc injectors and a Walbro 255.

My only complaint with e85 is that cold starts are a bi***. Once the car has warmed up everything is great. Before that, it takes awhile cranking before it starts and hesitates when you blip the throttle. I just sit there with the throttle cracked until it warms up, and then all is good.

 

[silvreclips]

Wow, that seems very lean for E-85. I have always heard you have to dump in a lot more fuel.

 

[turboglenn]

My only complaint with e85 is that cold starts are a bi***. Once the car has warmed up everything is great. Before that, it takes awhile cranking before it starts and hesitates when you blip the throttle. I just sit there with the throttle cracked until it warms up, and then all is good.

I would try adding a lot of fuel for cold starts.

Do you have a way to alter the coolant correction maps in your system? Or can you do some post start enrichment or priming pulse changes at all? I use to have a hell of a time with cold starts on my car almost killing the battery if i had to leave it outside overnight in the nebraska winters ( regular gas , 720cc injectors). Because it was always garage kept, i never had to tune that part of the system. Now that i'm in a small house till ours gets built, my car is outside and i had to add a TON of fuel for cold mornign starts and warmups.. I'm priming it with 50ms of pulse on fuel pump prime, then the A/F's are 10:1 for the first few minutes of warmup, then they go back to 12.5 - 13:1 ( i like to idle rich, it's smoother)

 

[Ajax]

I run E-85 aswell but I have dual walbro pumps with 1660cc injectors and Megasquirt using -8AN supply and -6AN return with a 1:1AFPR. Havent really pushed it yet bc I need to install my knocksense sensor maybe this winter. My reasoning was that E-85 105 Octane is much cheaper than C-116!! Just remember if you are in colder areas they blend it down quite a bit during the winter from what I heard almost to E-70.

 

[turboglenn]

Man there's only one place in town here that even has E-85 and it's where all the gov't vehicles fuel up. IF it ever becomes popular here i might do teh same thing.

Ajax, what kind of pumps are in teh dual setup you run, and did you have to make a custom hanger or are they inline with each other?

I seriously would like to change over when it's available to me.

 

[silvreclips]

Untill it becomes more popular is sounds like a big PITA right now. If you want the high octane just run alcohol injection or something.