Alternate Fuels Testers TEST RESULTS from testing done on Saturday 5/6/06. Purpose: TO FIND OUT IF THERE REALLY IS A FUEL MILLAGE IMPROVEMENT TO ADDING A SMALL AMOUNT OF ACETONE TO A TANK OF GASOLINE, USING JUST HALF AS MUCH ACETONE AS WAS USED LAST WEEK. Saturday's test involved using a Champion Power Equipment 3500 watt gasoline generator with a 1500 watt electric heater used as a test load. The fuel flow rate, using regular gasoline, was compared to the fuel flow rate using a mixture of regular gasoline with a small amount of acetone added, half as much as was used a week ago. Several tests were averaged together to help cancel out normal testing inaccuracies. Please see the test procedure in the comments at the blog: http://alternatefuels.blogspot.com/. Rachel Clark helped earlier in the day. Here is Rachel Clark, using a stop watch to time 50 milliliters of fuel flow through a beret. Also, this photo gives a good view of the whole test set up, especially the gasoline generator, the electric heater test load, and the beret.
This photo gives a good view of the 100 milliliter beret, showing the fuel level. It typically took a bit more than two minutes for the fuel level to drop from the zero reading to the 50 milliliter reading. This photo shows how a piece of copper tubing is glued, with JB Weld, to a piece of concrete. The concrete piece is sitting on two concrete blocks. The fuel line going from the carburetor and fuel filter is routed through the copper tubing to absorb vibrations from the engine in order to keep the carburetor fuel line from shaking the beret. We get more accurate readings this way.
CONCLUSION: The results did not indicate any improvement using the equivalent of 1 1/2 ounces of acetone per 10 gallons of gasoline as compared to using straight regular gasoline in our test set up. We have not tested with diesel fuel yet. UNEXPECTED DISCOVERY: What is strange is that both straight gasoline and gasoline with acetone will turn cloudy when sitting in a clear glass beaker and our tests indicate that there is a small improvement in fuel efficiency using cloudy gasoline. I don't know if having the beakers of fuel sitting in the sun has anything to do with this or not. I though so at first, but I just don't know. I am sure that this has nothing to do with adding or not adding a small amount of acetone to the gasoline. There will be some comments about this in this report and speculation about the reason at near the end of the report, but I really don't know why the fuel was turning cloudy. We need to find out why. The left beaker has cloudy fuel in it and the right beaker has clear fuel. What is interesting is that the fuel in the left beaker was left over from the last test and turned cloudy in less than 15 minutes. The fuel in the right beaker, which has more fuel in it, was sitting there for more than 30 minutes. This suggests that a thin layer of fuel will turn cloudy faster than a thick layer.
With this in mind, I pored some straight gasoline in a drip pan to confirm that it would turn cloudy quickly, being in a very thin layer. The gasoline in the drip pan started turning cloudy within a minute. This photo shows the cloudy fuel. I saved several batches of this cloudy fuel in a glass container, just enough for a series of tests. This photo shows that something is separating out of the fuel, what is it?
One thought it that since the gasoline we used is Union 76, which uses a little ethanol for an oxidizer instead of MTBE, perhaps the ethanol absorbed some water from the air, which caused it to separate out. I have read that ethanol must be virtually 200 proof (100 percent ethanol) to mix with gasoline. If there is a little water in the ethanol, then they won't mix. If this is the case, then the cloudiness of the fuel is tiny bubbles of ethanol, with water from the humidity in the air, that has separated out of the gasoline. Well, that is a theory, and I really don't know what is happing. If I am lucky enough to guess right, then perhaps we just tested a form of water injection, who knows? Now we have tested on two separate days and have not been able to find any improvement in fuel efficiency using acetone as a fuel additive. I don't want to do any acetone additive testing in an a gasoline automobile based on our tests so far, but we need to stay open to suggestions. Is it possible that the acetone I purchase at Orchard Supply is not pure enough and perhaps it has something mixed in it that foils our tests? Is there something wrong with our test procedure? Feedback is welcome. TEST DETAILS: Alternate Fuels Testers Test 5/6/06. Location: Stabilizer Solutions in the foot hills in Milpitas, thank to Peter Herrera! TEST SETUP: Gasoline: Union 76 regular. Acetone: Klean Strip brand from Orchard Supply 3500 Watt Gasoline Generator: Champion Power Equipment Model C46535. Test Load: Bionair Electric Heater model BH3930U, set at 1500 watts Before the test, I mixed 4 ¼ milliliters of acetone in one gallon of gasoline as the test sample. ENGINE WARM UP: At about 10:15 AM we started the Champion 3500 watt generator with a Bionair electric heater as a load, set at 1500 watts and ran it for 15 minutes to warm up the gasoline generator.
CHANGES TO LAST WEEK'S TEST SETUP: This time, we used one real 100 milliliter beret instead of two turkey basters. The reason for using one volumetric measuring device is that using two did not improve things last week. Also, we can be more certain that nothing has changed when switching from gasoline to the test sample, during the test, with only one. Ambient temperature in the shade now is: 62 degrees F. Note, we were going to use 100 milliliters per test, but after one test, we decided to use only 50 milliliters because it is hard to stop an air from getting into the fuel lines if the fuel runs below the 100 milliliter mark, near the bottom. By the way, it took 4:08 seconds time duration for 100 milliliters of fuel flow, but this being ignored in the conclusions of this testing. Please remember that all the test times are in minutes and seconds all through this report. As an example 2:03 is two minutes and three seconds. Here are the times logged for 50 milliliters of fuel flowing using straight gasoline: TEST DATA: 2:02 2:02, 2:02, 2:03, 2:02, Average: 2:022. Ambient temperature in the shade now is still 62 degrees F. We let the beret nearly run dry and then we added acetone-gasoline mixture for a little over 10 minutes. Here are the times logged for 50 milliliters of fuel flowing using the acetone-gasoline mixture: TEST DATA: 2:01, 2:01, (2:04 cloudy looking fuel), 2:03, 2:04, 2:04, 2:01, 2:02, 2:02, 2:02, Average: 2:024 with acetone-gasoline mix. UNEXPECTED RESULTS: Something strange is going on. When fuel is sitting outdoors in a clear glass beaker for a while, it gets milky. I noticed this last week too and I avoided testing with milky fuel then. It happens, both with and without acetone added. MORE UNEXPECTED RESULTS: Another strange thing is that the cloudiness will disappear if we wait long enough.
Perhaps the little bubbles of something unknown are coagulating into a few big bubbles, leaving a clear fuel appearance. INTEPERTITING ACETONE-GASOLINE RESULTS TO COMPARE GASOLINE TO TEST SAMPLE LATER: We can't use all the acetone-gasoline mixture test data, because time durations for the 50 milliliters of the milky acetone mixture test sample increased 2 and 3 seconds and then dropped a little as I kept adding test sample that had lost its cloudy appearance. It is very likely that there was some cloudy test sample left in the system mixing with the non cloudy test sample as I kept adding non-milky test sample. This indicates that the time durations increase is related to the cloudiness of the fuel for these tests. I should only used the test results without the cloudy test sample. Take the acetone-gasoline test data, and keep the first two tests done and last three done, to eliminate the tests with cloudy fuel: TEST DATA: 2:01, 2:01, 2:01, 2:02, 2:02, 2:02, Selected Average: 2:016 with acetonegasoline mix. This will be used lated to compare it to the straight gasoline test data. Now, I want to explore the cloudy fuel to see how it changes the fuel flow rate. Ambient temperature in the shade is now: 65 degrees F. EXPLORING CLOUDY FUEL ISSUE: Now I will be doing testing that was not planed for in the test procedure to determine the difference in fuel efficiency with cloudy gasoline as compared to clear gasoline. I will get back to comparing fuel flow rate with and without a tiny bit of acetone near the end of this test report. TEST WITH CLEAR GASOLINE FIRST AS A REFERENCE: I ran the fuel in the beret below the 100 milliliter mark to clear out the test sample. Then I kept adding straight gasoline to the beret for 10 minutes to continue to clear out the test sample and prime the fuel system with straight gasoline. Here are the times logged for 50 milliliters of fuel flowing using straight gasoline:
TEST DATA: 2:01, 2:02, 2:00, 1:59, 2:00, 2:04, 2:03, 2:03, 2:02, 2:03 Non-Cloudy Gasoline Average: 2:014 TEST WITH CLOUDY GASOLINE FOR COMPARISON: I have a limited amount of cloudy gasoline, so I only ran the engine for 7 minutes to clear out non-cloudy gasoline. Here are the times logged for 50 milliliters of fuel flowing using straight CLOUDY gasoline: TEST DATA: 2:05, 2:05, 2:05, 2:05, (2:08 gas looks more cloudy now), 2:06, 2:05, 2:05, 2:06 Cloudy gasoline Average: 2:056 What is the difference between clear cloudy gasoline and clear gasoline? 2:056 2:014 = 0:041 My conclusion is that with our test setup, the cloudy gas is a little more efficient than the clear gasoline because the engine runs about 4-seconds longer, on the average per test, with cloudy gas. I don't know what is making it cloudy. INTERPETING RESULTS BY STRIPING OUT CLOUDY TEST SAMPLE RESUTS: Let's compare the initial results with straight gasoline with the results using the test sample, with the cloudy fuel tests stripped out: Straight gasoline Average from earlier tests: 2:022. Test Sample, average, with cloudy fuel tests removed: 2:016. What is the difference? 2:022 2:016 = 0:006 which is 6/10 of a second. The difference is less than one second, which is not significant, and may be do to the normal inaccuracy of our testing. My conclusion is that, with our set up, there is no significant difference between running straight gasoline and gasoline with 1 ½ ounces per 10 gallon of gasoline, but running cloudy gasoline is a bit more efficient than non-cloudy gasoline. We need to know what caused gasoline to get cloudy and why this improves efficiency. We still need to test acetone in the diesel generator. Rudy Stefenel 5/8/06