Re: [ST] AVGAS

["Emile Nossin" <Emile@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>From: BrettWilson21@xxxxxxx
>I imagine it would be like running racing fuel e.g. 10% or 20% methanol. 
>When you twist the throttle - hang on!

That would be nice, but avgas 100 LL is just regular gasoline but
with extra additives to prevent pinging and knocking at high
altitudes, high temperatures and high power settings. A C172
engine is just an aircooled 4 cilinder boxer, imagine it running
full power climbing to 10.000 feet in thin air on a hot day, for
at least half an hour with hardly any forward speed (the prop
cools of course).

The Avgas 100LL is probably only gonna make your engine only run
(slightly?) worse because of these extra anti pinging additives.
"Premium" gas with higher octane all sounds cool, but the higher
octane just indicates it will be safer to run IF your engine
has a tendency to ping / predetonate etc. If it won't ping on
lower octane, it will probably run better on that because it has
less (safety, not "power") additives.

Of course the current BMW bikes have enflamed the myths about
higher octane again. As always, they require a higher octane
fuel because they would otherwise be pinging all the time. But
you can now set the chip in such a way that the engine can actually
run on lower octane fuel, but it will retard the ignition in such
a way that it won't ping. Of course, that will make the engine
run with less performance. But now people see that as a confirmation
that higher octane means more power, making them again suckers for
the "premium" and "super" marketing value that surrounds fuel with
anti pinging additives.

Kerosine won't make the bike run better either, that's just diesel.
And diesel / kerosine is cheap, because it goes into engines that
can burn anything without problems (jets, diesel engines). That's
why, in general aviation, they are slowly trying to introduce
diesels. They are more efficient and nowadays a lot lighter as
well, plus you can run them on kerosine which is cheap and has
much better availability than avgas 100LL. In Holland the diesel
revolution is not getting thru to general aviation yet, but my
aeroclub ( www.klmaeroclub.com ) will modify it's cessnas and
piper to run on regular automotive gas (MOGAS). It will be quite
a lot cheaper and the airplanes will run the same, after the
small modification, except when you'd taking them at extreme
high altitudes over the Alps (in that case you can fill it up
completely with avgas 100LL), but they almost never do that.

Emile
www.piloot.com

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