User:Hozer

From BioenergyWiki

Since I don't know what the policies are for user pages, I suppose having something is better than nothing, that's what a wiki is for, right? ;) --Hozer 01:28, 17 April 2007 (CEST)

Self-description

I grew up on a northern Iowa corn and soybean farm, and a neighbor of mine had a small scale fuel-ethanol setup on his farm in the 1980's. I am currently working for the DOE Ames Lab Scalable Computing Laboratory. I have long had an interested in energy in general, and got a degree in Electrical Engineering, and ended up working for the Department of Energy. Bioenergy is currently mostly a hobby and strong interest of mine, but I am considering switching my current Computer Engineering PhD program to the Biorenewables program at Iowa State University.

Bioenergy projects

I have a 2001 Toyota Prius which I have twice filled up with straight E85, after seeing a paper (need to find a reference) from someone in Minnesota running an early model prius on E85. On the last instance, I started with 3 bars on the fuel gauge tank (so somewhere between 3-4 gallons in the tank.. a very rough guess.. the prius gas gauge has been referred to as the "guess gauge"), and put in 5.187 gallons of E85. This brought the tank up to 1 bar short of full. The total mileage of the trip was 231 miles, with a reported MPG on the prius display screen of 32.9 mpg. This is not at all great, but I drove on an interstate at approximately 70-75mph most of the way with a 20-30 mph crosswind. Normal MPG under these conditions is around 35-40mpg, so given ethanol's lower energy content, and the prius not officially being a flex-fuel car, this seems reasonable. When I filled up with E10 mid-grade gasoline, refilling the tank until the pump shut off took 9.546 gallons. These leads me to believe there were about 4 gallons of E10 in the tank at the start of the trip, with 5 gallons of E85, so my best guess is I was running on approximately 50% ethanol. The car ran just fine, although the O2 fuel trim consistently reported about 15%.. indicating the computer had to add more fuel than it expected, which would be consistent with the lower energy content of E85.

I have also put half a talk of E85 in a 1978 Honda CX500 motorcycle.. but since it does not have fuel injection to adjust the mixture, it did not run particularly well. That experiment I don't intent to repeat until I can replace the carburetor with a programmable fuel injection unit.