Sugar-powered plane unveiled

"matt weber" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 22:50:24 +0800, Stealth Pilot
wrote:

On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 06:00:15 GMT, "Mal" wrote:

It would make a good glider tug !

BRAZILIAN aircraft manufacturer Embraer today unveiled the world's first
mass-produced commercial aircraft that runs on sugar cane ethanol fuel.

The Ipanema aircraft is designed to take advantage of Brazil's supplies
of
the fuel, which is cheaper, burns more cleanly and is more efficient
than
fuels refined from crude oil, company officials said.

Brazil is also a major producer of ethanol fuel, extracted from sugar
cane.

Satoshi Yokota, a top Embraer official, said operating the plane on
ethanol
was three to four times cheaper than using airplane fuel.

The Ipanema is designed mainly as a crop duster.

well those claims are deluded nonsense arent they.
ethanol is less efficient as a fuel energy source than avgas.
200 litres of ethanol does not have the anywhere near the range of
avgas and being a fermented biological material we'd denude the entire
world of arable land if we switched to it globally as a fuel.

...but then the greens were never good at maths.
Stealth Pilot
It is actually far worse than that. Without distillation, the best you
can do is 97% ethanol, with 3% water, which makes it unacceptable as
fuel. So you have to distill it to get rid of the 3% water.

The problem is that it takes more energy to distill the alcohol than
it produces as energy. That is why 100% ethanol is so expensive. The
only thing that makes it cheaper as fuel is the favorable tax
treatment it usually gets.

I've always wondered why those clever bioengineers couldn't teach some bugs
to produce iso-octane instead of ethanol. Iso-octane is the lab reference
for 100 octane motor fuel.