Bring me water!

Virtually all ethanol used as transport fuel is anhydrous. That is, all the water content has been removed through processing, because conventional wisdom was that you don’t mix water with ethanol. Hydrous ethanol, however, as the name suggests, is where the water content has not been removed.

Last year, we reported here on how research showed that using hydrous instead of anhydrous ethanol was both more sustainable and less expensive. Now, new research shows that besides the cost and environmental benefits, hydrous ethanol actually improves performance.

Two-stroke motorbike engines
HE Blends and Delft Technical University in the Netherlands commissioned researchers at the Laboratory for Engines & Exhaust Emission Control at Bern University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland to carry a study into the use of hydrous ethanol in two-stroke motorbike engines.

Hans Keuken, director of HE Blends, explains the reasoning behind the research: “If you visit a big, rapidly developing city like Manila, Shanghai, Calcutta or Bombay, the air quality is really a massive problem – and it’s mainly caused by these two-stroke moped scooters.”

The study measured the exhaust emissions, including particle mass and nano-particles, of a small motorbike – a 1976 Kreidler 2-S, 50cc – using regular gasoline and gasoline-ethanol blend fuels. The investigated fuels contained ethanol (E), or hydrous ethanol (EH) in the portion of five, ten and fifteen per cent by volume.

Test results
The test results showed that the hydrous ethanol blends, in particular the higher blends, EH10 and EH15, significantly reduced particle emissions when compared to the base fuel (regular gasoline) and other ethanol blends. At the same time, the EH10 and EH15 blends led to an increase in engine speed compared to the base fuel, but especially compared to the anhydrous ethanol blends, where a differential of almost 0.75 km/h was recorded between E15 and EH15.

“When we saw the results, we were amazed,” says Keuken. “We knew, of course, that hydrous ethanol offered significant environmental and cost savings, but it was great to see such noticeable improvements in engine performance, too. The results showed that when you increase anhydrous ethanol in the blend, performance decreases, but with hydrous ethanol – up to a point – the higher the blend the better the performance.”

Impressed
The results coincide with the end of a twelve-month pilot project in the Netherlands where hydrous ethanol was made available to drivers at four independent fuel stations across the country.

Keuken reports that the project, which ran from April 2008 to April 2009, was a great success. The hydrous ethanol accounted for up to fifteen per cent of total gasoline sales, despite having no marketing or advertising to promote it. And even with temperatures during the trial period dropping as low as -10°C, not a single fuel-related or technical complaint was received.

“I talked to the guys at Shell about that, and they were impressed. It is very unusual not to get any fuel complaints whatsoever with a new fuel,” he says.

Help make it work
Such was the success of the project that hydrous ethanol is going to be made available to all the independent filling stations in the Netherlands, which currently account for around one third of the market. “Now it is up to governments to get behind the technology and really help make it work,” says Keuken.