The Methanol Automobile Performance Research

As energy and environment has become the main trend of word economic development, the development of automobile industry have to go the energy-saving and environment-protecting way. Methanol, as the substitute fuel for automobiles, could not only reduce car's reliance on oil, but also effectively reduce the car exhaust emission. Due to this, the development and application of Methanol fuel and Methanol automobile has gained the attention of many countries. As we all know, China is lack of oil resources and is facing comparatively serious environment pollution issue, Methanol was used as automobile fuel since 1970s. We performed tests for M15-M25 Methanol fuels during the Sixth Five-Year Plan period at Shanxi province, and started to use the lower proportion methanol gasoline during the 1980s in many provinces. And we got a satisfactory result.Based on a great deal of research work people have done home and abroad, we know that lower proportion methanol gasoline could be used directly on normal gasoline engines, no other modifications need to be made to the engines themselves; but its weakness point is that it is not economic enough. Although higher proportion methanol gasoline and pure methanol gasoline could reach its best performance when used on gasoline engines, it requests pretty many modifications to the compression ratio, ignition system, feeding system, etc. The cost is relatively high.The common method that Auto Refitting Market is using is to lengthen the pulse width of fuel spray. This way, methanol fuel could be burnt on normal gasoline machines directly. However, till now, no relevant agency and department has researched into the performance aspect of such modified cars. This thesis mainly focuses on the performance investigation and test for these modified automobiles, and mainly includes aspects listed below:(1) Methods used to modify methanol automobiles.(2) Performance impacts to automobiles caused by burning methanol fuel, such as:Automobile Dynamics, Fuel Economy, and Emission characteristics.(3) Analysis of the adaptability of automobile parts to methanol fuel.According to our tests and investigations, we found that methanol fuel could be used on automobiles. Their dynamics characteristics keeps the same; the fuel consumption is increased; the possibility to raise its economy is very high based on current price of automobile fuels; and the discharge of pollutants got significant improvement. The Electronic Control System and most of the automobile parts (except for the Fuel Pump Assembly) fit well to the methanol fuels.