Conclusion
My experiment showed that ethanol stands somewhere in between gasoline and diesel for burning efficiency, but gives off significantly less pollution than diesel and gasoline. Ethanol ranked the highest in terms of energy content (Btu), which implies that that ethanol will help your engine generate more horsepower, and become more powerful. Furthermore, the fact that ethanol is produced from renewable resources, makes it a sustainable alternative to conventional fuels which are derived from non-renewable resources. Therefore, ethanol is a better fuel than conventional fuels, because it provides a better trade-off between environmental cleanliness, sustainability and fuel grade.
Future work
If I had more time to research this project, it would be interesting to learn more about fuels other than the ones that I have tested, such as bio-diesel. I would also test the fuels under internal combustion engine-like conditions to examine the comparative fuel economy and Btu under controlled conditions.
Simulation of combustion engine-like controlled conditions would exclude possibility of many sources of errors that I suspect were involved in my experiments. Potential sources of errors in my experiments are as follows:
- When soaking the wicks in my experiment, some of the fuel could have been left behind in the test tube, giving me biased results.
- Sudden air movement could have affected the results of my pollution experiment by blowing away the emissions
- The aluminum bowls and steel rods could have absorbed some of the heat from the flame in my energy content experiments, slowing the heating of the water
- When lighting the soaked wicks some of the ethanol might have evaporated, because of its accelerated evaporation rate, compared to the other fuels
- When taking the wick out of the test tube the fuel might have dripped onto the table, lowering the fuel content in the wick
Nevertheless, I think my comparisons are still valid, because all trials were performed the same way and, as humanly possible. Therefore, any source of error that was introduced was randomly distributed and not biased.