E-85 as a piston aviation fuel, thoughts...

Cujet, what is your take on using rotary engines in aircraft?

A good number of people have tried. It does not seem to work out all that well. The claims that a wankel engine can run on just about any fuel are very interesting. I've never seen that pulled off. Most of the time, they are conventional or turbocharged Mazda conversions that use high octane fuel, fly for a short time and are never seen again. This one is a great example.

 
I've come across a few claims that fuel consumption goes down as load goes up--part throttle they are not so good, whereas piston engines do well--but that they flip relative performance as throttle opens up. Dunno. Certainly is the engine that just won't quite die and go away.
 
Cujet, what is your take
As for E85, dunno. Water and corrosion would have to be overcome. Seal the fuel system off when not in use? I wonder if somehow you could pressurize unused takes with something dry, either clean dry air or nitrogen (probably want to seal the tank off fully).

Or we could just do what Brazil did and design the engines to use hydrous ethanol then your point is moot but you would also need either glow plugs or a aux tank of 100ll / ether for cold starts.


The trouble with aircraft is there are very strong long standing legal aspects that force standardized platforms and fuel certifications.

The we can’t do it because we never did it aspect is very strong, you have many very old planes and it would take a long time before you had significant mass for the fuel to become common enough to carry.

Add into this the guy that invented the fuel nozzles to prevent lazy operators from miss fueling their plane with jet fuel died from a lazy operator force filling him with jet fuel. This would be another failure point like that

Lots of semantics to overcome, sort of like the affordable 6 passenger 42mpg diesel plane only a few people have 15 years on.
 
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