Water/Methanol lubricant
Water/Methanol lubricant
(OP)
I have been running one of my cars on methanol for some time. It's a supercharged 98 Buick Park Avenue. I do not flush the system or any of that nonsense, it's a weekend driver/ fun car and I leave straight methanol in the system all the time. Apart from lots of fuel pump failures (primarily after neglecting the car and leaving it sitting for quite some time), I have had no problems. I do run a top end lube mixed in with the methanol. Up to this point I have been using water injection and spraying through the supercharger and the air/water intercooler that sits immediately beneath it, which has worked great. I am making some changes that I'm thinking will make spraying water through the intercooler a bad idea, so I need to come up with a different solution.
I just finished up a refrigeration setup for my intercooler reservoir using the vehicle's A/C system and a rear evaporator core from a suburban. I run 50/50 water methanol as an intercooler coolant and propane as a refrigerant, and have a large, very well insulated reservoir (it's literally a modified cooler). I've measured temperatures as low as 0 degrees F in that tank. I have pretty big doubts about whether it's a good idea to spray a fine mist of water through an intercooler that's significantly below freezing, even with the no doubt very hot supercharger outlet temps. Basically, this improvement in intercooling necessitates that my water injection take place post-intercooler and unfortunately there's really no good space/place to put nozzles since the injector ports are actually IN the heads. Ultimately, I've decided that the easiest, most accurate, and least expensive way around this is to just utilize my existing fuel injectors for water injection by mixing the water in directly with the methanol in my fuel tank.
Do I really NEED the water injection? Probably not, but with it I can run my tune one the ragged edge in terms of fastest flame speed AFR (which according to an epa study is around 13.3:1 for methanol, converted to the gasoline scale most tuners are familiar with) and still have the safety margin afforded by larger liquid volumes/greater heat of vaporization capacity in the combustion chamber.
Point of the story is, I need a lubricant or additive for anti-corrosion that will mix with both water and methanol and not adversely affect the combustion process to any significant degree. I'm investigating several possibilities but I thought I would ask around here to see what other people's ideas are. Thanks in advance for any help.
I just finished up a refrigeration setup for my intercooler reservoir using the vehicle's A/C system and a rear evaporator core from a suburban. I run 50/50 water methanol as an intercooler coolant and propane as a refrigerant, and have a large, very well insulated reservoir (it's literally a modified cooler). I've measured temperatures as low as 0 degrees F in that tank. I have pretty big doubts about whether it's a good idea to spray a fine mist of water through an intercooler that's significantly below freezing, even with the no doubt very hot supercharger outlet temps. Basically, this improvement in intercooling necessitates that my water injection take place post-intercooler and unfortunately there's really no good space/place to put nozzles since the injector ports are actually IN the heads. Ultimately, I've decided that the easiest, most accurate, and least expensive way around this is to just utilize my existing fuel injectors for water injection by mixing the water in directly with the methanol in my fuel tank.
Do I really NEED the water injection? Probably not, but with it I can run my tune one the ragged edge in terms of fastest flame speed AFR (which according to an epa study is around 13.3:1 for methanol, converted to the gasoline scale most tuners are familiar with) and still have the safety margin afforded by larger liquid volumes/greater heat of vaporization capacity in the combustion chamber.
Point of the story is, I need a lubricant or additive for anti-corrosion that will mix with both water and methanol and not adversely affect the combustion process to any significant degree. I'm investigating several possibilities but I thought I would ask around here to see what other people's ideas are. Thanks in advance for any help.





RE: Water/Methanol lubricant
This car probably won't see the streets again until it's at least 50 degrees out as cold-starting is really a chore on straight methanol, and my propane bottle doesn't build enough pressure for the car to idle on when it's this cold out...so I'm just trying to get all my bases covered and do all my homework over the winter downtime.
RE: Water/Methanol lubricant
That doesn't really answer your question though...
RE: Water/Methanol lubricant
The point is, it's not necessary for the liquid to evaporate before reaching the cylinders. It is necessary, or at least very useful, for the droplets to be small enough and well distributed enough that they reach all cylinders with fairly even distribution, and that they don't wet out on the port and cylinder surfaces, rather than remaining suspended in the charge. These requirements are identical to those of a premixed liquid fuel, like gasoline, and the preferred metering solutions are not dissimilar either.
"Schiefgehen will, was schiefgehen kann" - das Murphygesetz
RE: Water/Methanol lubricant
To address your other statement, I'm no longer interested in the water for charge cooling since I am confident I have that taken care of by other means. I want to use it to help control combustion temperatures and allow me to run air fuel ratios that would otherwise be considered extremely dangerously lean (as I said before, 13.3:1 or so in terms of a gasoline afr...when most way overboosted M90 guys are probably running in the 11s to 1 for additional cooling). Methanol, as I understand it but have not seen firsthand, can be very sensitive to pre-ignition despite it's excellent resistance to detonation so what I'm really after is a way to keep the combustion chambers cooler to ensure I don't end up with any pre-ignition sources, especially since I intend to experiment with such relatively lean air fuel ratios. I don't know how sound the theory is that it doesn't matter whether the additional liquid mass to cool the combustion process is fuel or water, but I intend to try it both ways and see what works best. Obviously water has the higher heat of vaporization and isn't going to burn to contribute to combustion heat so it seems like sound logic that it will control combustion temperatures better. Whether or not that's beneficial from a power standpoint is a question I'm very interested in and I believe capable of answering.
I do have a TFX combustion pressure logger (which is by far the most expensive and under-utilized piece of equipment I've ever purchased...being a mere hobbyist), and I fully intend to do lots of tests in different configurations to get some hard data and determine what is actually going on inside the cylinder and whether or not water injection in this manner or any other is of any real benefit to me.
Basically what I'm saying is that I have the equipment to determine definitively whether or not this is going to be beneficial to my setup so I'm not really worried at this point about the theory of whether it will or won't work or do me any good, I'm only interested in what I can do to overcome or minimize the lubrication and corrosion problems I may encounter when I do test this.
RE: Water/Methanol lubricant
RE: Water/Methanol lubricant
RE: Water/Methanol lubricant
RE: Water/Methanol lubricant
RE: Water/Methanol lubricant
And yes, I do anticipate cold starts to be even worse with water in the mix. It will definitely be warmed up on propane...I currently have a pretty primitive propane injection setup, I expect to have to improve that a bit both in capacity and control mechanism if it's going to be seeing more frequent use. The car does idle like a champ on propane though, and it doesn't take long at all even on the coldest days to be warm enough to run on the methanol. Maybe 30 seconds tops.
RE: Water/Methanol lubricant
RE: Water/Methanol lubricant
RE: Water/Methanol lubricant