octane booster

[Matthew Beaubien]

>      We have successfully used Toluene in a mix of 1L for 5L of 96 octane 
>      leaded fuel, also gives you beautiful flames out the back and that 
>      nice crisp popping sound when you back off.  But to find out if it is 
>      an octane problem, get a tank of avgas (100 octane) if this doesn't 
>      fix the problem, its not an octane problem.  However, if it does fix 
>      it, it is definitely cheaper to buy Toluene and mix your own.

20% concentration is pretty high from what I've heard. I've been told that
tolulene burns quite a bit hotter than gasoline so you don't want to add
too much. I also think that it burns slower.

Perhaps %5 tolulene and 5% methanol would be good? Methanol has about the
same combustion speed as gasoline and it has a very high octane.

Then there's M85 which already has gasoline, methanol, xylene, tolulene,
benzene etc... One that note, I just read an SAE article on Ford's Flex
Fuel Vehicle (Taurus). When they ran it on M85, they had severe
preignition problems. They ended up redesigning the cylinder head (removed
some squish to promote flame propagation). I was quite surprised.


Matt.
mbeaubie at gpu.srv.ualberta.ca