I've driven many thousands of miles while injecting water directly into the intake manifold of an old Chevy straight six. The carburetor was also injecting gasoline, and any computer in this vehicle was being transported in the cab. However, I made few if any changes to the stock engine parameters. It ran great and had a measurably improved efficiency. Not measurable by much, and a royal pain to keep in tune, but it did work. Some WWII aircraft also used water injection. It's a very old technology that serves specific purposes very well, but it's not so great for everyday automotive use.GIThruster wrote:I've noticed before that Skippy has a habit of commenting on subjects he knows nothing about.
I have a backpacking stove that runs on all sorts of fuels and it doesn't include a computer, but it also doesn't include any moving parts. The FACT of the matter is, that modern gasoline engines cannot burn ethanol without huge modifications, which is why there are special engines developed for ethanol. Since butanol has a higher energy density than ethanol, one expects the modifications would be more limited, but you cannot just dump butanol into a gasoline engine any more than you can dump 2-3 gallons of water into your fuel tank and expect the engine to run properly.
If you don't believe me--and you should since I started working in an auto shop 41 years ago--go dump some water into your car and tell us what the computer makes of it.
I've also put significant miles, probably over 100k, on vehicles that were converted from gasoline to propane. Some vehicles that were simply converted ran acceptably, the few that were rebuilt with higher compression and different ignition timing profiles ran much, much better than their gasoline counterparts.
As for butanol, I've never operated an engine with the stuff, but I have met a GA pilot who operated his experimental aircraft (an RV-6) on butanol with no measurable detrimental effects, and with identical engine performance according to his extensive engine monitors.
Also, after studying biofuels in general, including butanol, and operating a Dodge Cummins diesel vehicle exclusively on biodiesel for nearly 6 months or roughly 10k miles, I am inclined to lend credibility to the claims that butanol can directly replace gasoline with little or no changes to both vehicles and infrastructure. The differences between refined diesel fuel and biodiesel are not so different from the difference between refined gasoline and butanol. If anything, biodiesel is more difficult to deal with because it is corrosive to older rubber hoses and seals.