propane, ethanol vapor

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I've heard of using propane to feed a diesel engine once it's running steady on the highway. Has anyone built an ethanol vaporizer to feed their engine?

Wet ethanol is about 25% cheaper than anhydrous, and might cost less per BTU than diesel fuel.
 
There's 2 sawmills in my area that run their Cat. engines on propane. I've read about propane conversions for diesel PUs and having a propane gas PU the idea has always been on my bucket list. So, why not ethanol?
 
i have found that when you change a regular gasoline in to a propane engine, it seemed to lose 20% power at least. it is said you lose 15%, that is wrong. the reason you so much power is that the propane as a vapor, it takes up a lot of space in the intake, that crowds out air. my guess is that a diesel engine has larger intake ports. you could mach an engine just for propane, but to switch back to gas you lose again
 
Propane also has an octane rating of something like 110.

I wonder if some of the power loss could be mitigated with timing and compression for 110 octane.

Running 14:1+ compression works in Alcohol Dragsters.
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that's like 116 octane

I forgot the a/f ratio on alky cars. like 6:1....I just know I hated being behind them in the staging lanes.
 
you are right propane does have a lot of octane. and it seams to me you know lots more about these things than i. but if you you cant get it in the chamber it wont do you any good.
 
There are a few liquid propane injection systems out now that inject it as a liquid so have power equivalent to the gasoline engine. I forget who, but someone was taking 5.4L F150s and doing an LPI conversion on them. I want to say Roush, but I dont think thats right. I dont know if they are still doing it as that was 4 or 5 years ago I last looked at them.
If you put in propane as a gas, the best way would be large intake ports, basically race size ports for a gas engine of the same size. Use 3 or 5 valves for extra intake flow. Probably then cone back to a normal size in the Intake manifold. 12:1 compression. You are basically talking about a custom engine and no one is going to do that for a niche product. They just slap propane system on the same everything. Same thing with E85.
 
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TO: colt i did not know that there was a propane injection system . it might show a new way to go. i did like one thing about propane was that at 35f to 52f to ran better that the older carbs. but around 10 f you had to weight for the propane to vaporize.
 
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