The results were pretty amazing. For the fuel economy portion of the video anyway. Grab some G54 merch here - www.en.garage54.ru/ For business inquiries: promotion@garage54.ru
in the 80s F1, FIA put out a rule to limit fuel tank size so the teams started using coolers to cool down the fuel way below zero degrees to put more fuel in the tank because when something gets cold it also gets smaller and denser which also helped with engine performance.
Also if they didn't burn off the excessive kg fuel during the first few laps or so until fuel started heating up the fuel tank would dump fuel out. So you'd effectively got 2 laps of free fuel
The increase in preformance only work with manifold injection. With direct injektion it does not help.of cause, direct injection wad not used back then.
@@matsv201 I would like to know what happens when diesel tdi fuel temperature changes, I know if you fool the sensor to think the fuel is super super hot, it will smoke and spool the turbo like crazy. I just saw on my tdi engine the fuel temperature thermostat in the fuel filter housing keeps the fuel at ca. 80 degrees. Probably to aid atomization
@@StrongOneX TDI is direct injection.. so .. hot fuel works just fine. Some cars have fuel heaters to be able to run on vegetable oil with out modification. Thy have a fuel temp of at leas 40C even for the low pressure pump. I don´t know how hot the second heater makes it. That is both for atomization as well as to reduce the viscosity.
Try building a big refrigerated manifold intercooler, and see the effects of cool, cold, chilled and frosted air on engine performance? Then try warm, hot, boiling temp, and superheated air on engine performance? I think you may find the results quite interesting.
on a carburettored engine, sir too cold results in the fuel and water vapour in the air freezing and icing up the carb leading to poor running which is why older cars have a 'hot' intake for winter use. unlike what you see on Roadkill etc, the constant rejetting of the carbs is unnecessary. just put a proper filter on and use the warm intake in winter. the loss of 2 or 3hp is better than breaking down in sub zero temps
One if not the best show and translation on RU-vid. Awesome guys, maybe i should pay a visit someday once things calm down. Gasoline in a water kettle? world first! ... lol 14:20 The fuel line might be to long underneath the floor pan of the car, maybe a repeat is on it's place but use a insulated fuel line.
The cooler the air the denser it is.gasoline is highly volatile, which is why we put tetraethyl lead in it to raise its octane in the first place. Octane is gasoline resistance to ignition. The lower it is the easier it is to set off. The higher it is, the more resistance it has to firing early. This was extremely important in early engine designs that needed higher compression, read as cylinder pressure, to make decent power while not igniting prematurely. There are several things that contribute to cylinder pressure, static compression being just one of them. Cam timing and rod length along with carburator size can make a difference, and all of these things could cause early ignition if not properly balanced. That said, the volatility of gasoline makes it tend to evaporate quickly. When filling you gas tank in the hot summer months the molecules in gasoline are beginning to evaporate cause the fuel to be less dense than it is in the cold of winter. Air temperature can also effect gasoline density as it flows into the engine. At higher temperatures the air heats the gasoline when they are mixed, atomized fuel spread into the incoming air gives it a Les dense mixture, reducing power. The colder the air, the denser the mixture. This is the same thing that happens to the gasoline itself. When gas is colder it is denser and you get more fuel per gallon than when it is hot outside. Fill your tank early in the morning, or after the temp has cooled down at night to get more fuel for your buck.
I can't think of anyone else on RU-vid who has tried this experiment so the results are interesting to see. Video idea: Use a engine block as a positive displacement supercharger for another engine. Like a Lada motor that is gear or belt driven so it pumps more air into the actual running Lada motor and thus should make more power.
Well... that's why intercoolers were invented... And why your petrol engine ECU calculates the amount of air depending on intake air temperature (measured by a intake air temp sensor) and an airflow rate (MAF sensor which often integrates temp sensor too), and calculating the resulting incoming air density to infer the amount of oxygen that will be present. You can get it more efficient, hence the use of intercoolers, but its mainly for diesels that always provide excess of air, whereas petrol engines require incoming air to be managed more precisely for a proper stoichiometric ratio to be maintained for the fuel injected.
Higher intake temperatures generally reduce the output of the the engines significantly. As a person who lives in Middle East and goes off-roading quiet often I can def confirm this. There are multiple factors at play such as air density, but also take in consideration that the hot temps will eventually heat up you entire engine which will reduce overall performance. Generally where I reside (KSA) in rush house traffic in afternoon intake temps are usually around 60-70 degrees Celsius (140-160 °F) (OUTISDE TEMPS BEING AROUND 40°C(104°F). This is usually cause the intake box in most cars pulls in air on top of front wheel wells (either right or left). Which is usually very hot air given the heat coming off your engines and the surrounding cars.
@@SLMAHKMY87those amounts of heat in intake manifold are easily reached in diesel engines. Even if outside temperature is around 20 degrees, compressing air by turbo provides very high temperatures, where air cooled intercooler is able to drop down the temperature to somewhere around 40-60 degrees Celsius. It is widely used to significantly cool very hot air coming out of turbo, reaching at high pressures around 90 degrees.
Colder gasoline is slightly more dense but the biggest difference is going to be from air temperature. Every 40°F is going to make roughly a 5% change in your air fuel ratio so colder air temps are going to require more fuel to achieve the same AF ratio. Couple that with the added drag from increased air resistance, and more parasitic loss through the drivetrain due to the oil and fluids not being quite as hot and it makes perfect sense why fuel economy drops in the winter.
Not to mention you use some of that engine heat for your cabin so the engine runs a bit colder all the time during winter meaning that all the fluids running inside the engine are going to be slightly stiffer and thus create a bit more friction.
I had a chevy truck with a big block 8.1 liter 496 and I always ran it on E85 (computer was tuned for it to get max perf on E85, otherwise all stock). I was up North one winter and it was -35F and we had cold advisories. I had to drive 200 miles south at night to get back home and on my way back saw some chicks stranded in their car on the side of the road, stopped to see if they needed any help, but they were good and had help coming. So the truck was warm, I had driven about 75 miles at that point, but it was cold and presumably the E85 was very cold too. When I took off I floored it just to have fun. Fastest acceleration by far I ever felt in that truck. That was awesome. I think the fuel temp can make a difference, but to get more power you need to burn more fuel and for an experiment like this you need cold air as well to also get more oxygen, which I understand would be difficult to do. Perhaps another way to simulate it would be to super cool the fuel but also feed in some pure oxygen.
Dense -35F ambient air temperature yields just about the best available performance from an internal combustion gasoline engine.... Even colder temps stiffen lubricants, transmission, wheel bearing grease, belts, etc, excessively. Wind drag also increases in more frigid temperatures.
Assuming the air/fuel ratio and everything else remains the same, cooling the fuel will somewhat improve the engine's performance since cool fuel is denser than hot fuel. A higher density of air and fuel means more molecules of each can fit in the cylinders every cycle. But unless the engine is vaporlocking from the fuel boiling, which normally doesn't happen on fuel injected engines, the temperature of the fuel isn't nearly as important as the temperature of the air because the air is the vast majority of the combustion charge and the fuel is a small part overall, so changing the air's density will be much more meaningful. Also, actually getting cool fuel into the intake is much easier said than done because the fuel will pick up a lot of heat while flowing through the carburetor or fuel rails and injectors since all this stuff is in direct contact with the engine.
There's also the issue of air temperature, air is denser when it's cold which means more gets into the combustion chamber and makes for a bigger bang, hence why intercoolers are a thing, add to that the chilled and denser fuel, and yeah, more power when things are cold, so the experiment could do with having the air chilled and heated in a similar fashion (thrown an intercooler into a bath that has the dry ice or boiling water in) and see how that changes performance, coupled with the chilled and heated fuel respectively (and swapping things about too to add to the mix, so hot fuel & cold air, cold full & hot air, etc.)...
Very easy to understand results and makes sense. If the intake air could also be cooled/heated I imagine the results would be even more impressive. I was holding my breath when you had the gasoline boiling in the electric coffee pot. Then when you flipped the switch on the generator I couldn't watch. That was some dangerous stuff going on there! Glad nothing bad happened and really enjoy watching your vids.
Many regions have a winter gas blend and a summer gas blend. The change in blend can cause the change in performance. The winter blends tend to vaporize better at the lower temps.
The volume of the fuel will vary a lot depending on temperature, particularly with the extreme range of temperature you were using. That wouldn't affect the accuracy of the acceleration test(Though the human factor will.), but the economy test would have been MUCH more accurate if done by weight instead of volume. But whatever. I still have fun watching your guy's stuff anyway.
Let's also note, that cooler fuel will result in a cooler mixture in the combustion chamber, which will remove more heat from engine when vaporized. A cooler combustion chamber will tolerate higher comperssion without detonation thus it will act like higher octane fuel, ignition advance and thus power can be sustained higher without engine knock (leading to cut back ignition timing to avoid engine damage).
@@mann_idonotreadreplies Yes, literally. I also forgot to mention that fuel itself will deteriorate as temperature rises, leading to loss of octane rating. And also the fact that in older racing series, chilled fuel was put into the tanks during pit stops, on the purpose of giving mixture a head-start in heat removal (as well as exploiting the cooler fuel's higher density, resulting in more fuel in the same volume limited by the tank). But if you're skeptic, you can read about this in A. Graham Bell's book titled Four Stroke Performance Tuning (also in Forced Induction Performance Tuning).
Petrol fuel is not like water which consists of like 99.99% water, a single type of molecule. A petrol mixture is like 1000's of different chemicals. By boiling them, you simply distill, getting rid of some of the lighter fractions that burn easily (and have lower boiling point), leaving heavy (higher boiling point), hard-to-burn fractions behind. A modern car like this with electronic injectors and PID control (adjusting for burn rate measured by oxygen in the exhaust), you would not feel any acceleration differences and your engine ECU would simply feed more (less efficient) fuel in to get the same burn rate. Which is obviously much less efficient.
Now build an intercooler and load it up with dry ice to cool the air being sucked into the engine! Still this was interesting. Well perhaps not the boiling gasoline so much. Might have been more interesting to see what something like 40°C would do rather than going for boiling the gas. Now I remember seeing some dragster having a CO2 cooled intercooler. This was way back, probably 40 years or so, and I can't remember if they cooled only the air or if they also cooled the fuel. Finally it may be interesting to experiment with water injection! That's another trick I remember hearing about where water mist is sprayed into the air intake. Supposedly a minute amount of water mist can cool the air fuel mixture increasing the density and causing more air to be sucked into the cylinder meaning more fuel and air will mean more power.
this would be super awesome to do EFI vs carbi VS direct injection vs indirect injection, petrol vs diesel, cold/warm/hot starting how easy it starts and restarts, very hot weather freezing cold fuel, freezing cold weather stinking hot fuel. I'd imagine that it makes the most difference with diesel doing a cold start in freezing cold temperatures with stinking hot fuel since it would be much more prone to detonating than cold fuel in a cold engine and it would be way better for fuel consumption/mileage since the fuel would easily burn when its hotte. the trifecta of fire is HEAT, FUEL, AIR if your missing or lacking any one or more of those there will be no fire.
*I used to bring warm bottles out to the desert for shooting targets. I'd drop in dry ice just before placing them and show them to expand before shooting them* The 2 liter bottles were able to hold over 120 psi without exploding (checked with a gauge). The targets made a nice violent explosion when the kids would shoot them with a .22 cal rifle 💥
I'm making this comment at 1:20 into video....I don't know what your going to do, but if you build the right type of unit for heating up fuel ..you'll be building a GEET system....where as you could potentially burn any fluid! I've mentioned this before as a project for garage 54!! Much luv and respect 54s!
Many years a go the Honda XBR500 motorcycle had a reputation for not starting/running when it became hot during the Summer time, it turned out that starting the bugger became an issue as the fuel in the tank underthe bright sunlisght became VERY HOT and combined with a hot engine, it just made things worse. Shame that, as it was an underrated bike! 😏👍 😎🇬🇧
The reason for better power in cold temps is not because of the fuel temp. Its the air temp. Colder air means more and denser air makes it into the cylinder. But it was interesting on the mileage. Also my personal hero Smokey Yunick built a hot vapor fuel engine. Super heating gasoline into vapor. He was able to achieve relatively large hp and mileage numbers doing so. I have also worked on it since we have some better materials to work with now. Its a very viable setup.
I'm glad you measured the gasoline at room temperature, so volume wasn't a factor in this experiment--but I *also* am curious if a gas station pump, if pumping 1L of below-zero gasoline, compared to 1L of very hot gasoline, would serve a significantly different mass for the same price. If you look up gasoline's coefficient for thermal expansion and run the math you might expect around 10% difference in mass between hot and cold at the same volume.
Heating the gasoline turned it into diesel fuel. It's not the fuel temperature, but the ambient temperature that changes the combustion rate. Cold air holds more Oxygen.
This is on a fuel-injected engine that no doubt has electronic control of the air/fuel mixture. I would expect it to be roughly the same in terms of performance. A carbureted engine might be very different.
Exactly. Otherwise, it would make a difference only at wide-open throttle, and only if the ECU has any headroom to put in more fuel anyway. Of course, this would only apply to power not to efficiency. Then again I just got up and haven't had any coffee so maybe I'm thinking about this wrong...
Clever thinking guys excellent craftsman ship , putting the devices together that you need in each experiment and testing. its all in good fun good job guys.
Thanks. The volume should not be measured while hot as the density would be less, as yes, evaporation would be a factor but these results are quite conclusive that cold petrol is more efficient. It would be good to install a very accurate flow meter connected to a computer.
Old Mercedes used to have the fuel line go through the air conditioner suction line - refrigerated fuel. It was probably to avoid vapor lock in hot weather.
it makes sense to me-- the Engine will get "injected" gasoline up to its burning temp regardless (thats why the Acceleration tests ended up about the same)...but the gas thats still in the Tank ('not yet injected') responds predictably to Thermal Expansion...if you put "a liter" of Boiling Gasoline into a container, you might end up with closer to .75L of 'room-temp' gas, once its cooled...on the flipside, super-cooled gas is Condensed, so it will 'stretch out' as it warms up-- "a Liter" might end up being 1.25L afterward... ...and of course, these numbers arent Precise or anything, im just using them to Explain the Principle...
Would having a return line of made a significant difference in leveling out the results? Would be great to repeat the experiment with a return line going to a separate container to see how much is returned at -30 compared to +75. Also, does diesel follow the same trend?
A diesel engine runs.far better when it's raining or heavy mist as the moisture sucked in to the air intake is like throwing water on a hot frying pan and helps with combustion and more power pls give that a try like some sort of moisture injection huh I love your vids
You should repeat this in the depths of winter when the air going into the engine is denser, much denser air should make more of a difference than just heading or cooling the fuel. There is a reason why turbo engined cars have an intercooler... cold dense air is better for performance.
I also want to add from this experiment, it is likely that the fuel used here is regular gasoline with an octane rating which may not be too high, but what if. Using fuel with a higher octane will the results be the same or different
Very interesting topic with interesting results, how about trying out how air temperature flowing into motor makes difference with consumption and power
That actually was a great experiment 🧪 I also noticed my fuel mileage going down during the very hot summer months here in Arizona, and in d the winter improves by a few mileage’s!
It's not the fuel temperature, it's the air intake temperature, colder air is more dense, and therefore it means more air per stroke, warm air is less dense so less volume per stroke. This is the purpose of cold air intake systems and intercoolers. The fuel will heat up instantly when put under compression by the pistons. So the temperature of the fuel going in is irrelevant unless it's too cold to flow through the fuel system. Hot gasoline may improve milage due to it becoming vapor more easily when hot, the vapor is what actually burns, so this may help with performance a tiny bit.
Saludos Garage 54...excelente video!!! Mi sugerencia para uds es...gastaría menos cobustible un motor cualquiera aspirando aire frio o helado en lugar de aire a temperatura ambiente?? los felicito por sus videos!!!
Well, the colder the air the more dense = more air for combustion = more power. My old speed density 89 v8 mustang was night and day in a cold day vs hot.
Quick way to test. Drive your car when it’s insanely hot during the day. When it finally cools down hopefully this year. Drive your car… you should notice a slight difference. Like it can breathe when it’s colder. Which makes sense. Also same with high and low elevation
20oz bottles make the biggest booms. Trust me, back in the late 90s I thoroughly tested this with toilet bowl cleaner and tin foil. The 20oz did the best!
Living here in Canada, I can guarantee I burn double the fuel in winter than in summer. At -40 it can cost me $10 just to start my truck. Such an interesting test.
I remember checking fuel economy when I first got my Ford Focus. Filled the tank full, Drove about 80 miles. Topped the tank up. When I got to my buddy's shop at the 100 mile mark I calculated the mileage against topping up the tank. It showed around 50 mpg at the 80 mile mark. Then I drove back to my starting point and filled back up from the same pump. So total trip mileage was about 200 miles. Calculating showed that my miles per gallon was about 32mpg. Huh? So I did some reading. Gas in the stations tank in the ground is about 52-54f. The air temperature that day was 80f. Gas expands 1% for every degree Fahrenheit. So my original feel expanded about 30%. So driving at that temperature, with fuel return back to the tank simply expanded the fuel so it took up 30% more volume. Meaning topping up the fuel was 30% less fuel giving me a false mpg reading. So what little gas I put in then expanded while visiting my buddy and so the refill I did showed the more true mpg. So the Garage54 experiment is flawed because cold gas is denser that room temperature gas, which is denser than heated gas. Otherwise, one liter of room temperature gas will be a smaller volume when cold, and a larger volume when heated. The trick for better fuel economy is heating the gas after it leaves the tank and using hot air coming from the radiator to feed the intake. That yields better better evaporation/smaller fuel particles with less unburnt fuel wasted. My Geo Metro which I took it from it's EPA 38mpg (If I remember right) to a consistent 52-53 mpg. When I bought it I was only getting 25mpg. I still haven't modded the intake or exhaust manifolds or even have the head off yet.
I have thought for years that heating the fuel with the engine's coolant might improve fuel efficiency since warm fuel evaporates much better and should mix with the air more completely and evenly, but I haven't got around to testing that yet. Also, controlling the fuel's temperature by running it through a fluid to fluid heat exchanger located right at the fuel rail's inlet and running either hot or cold fluid through the heat exchanger would have been a much better way to test this since it would remove the variables of the fuel warming up or cooling off as it flows through the fuel lines, evaporating when heated, or being a different density in the tank. Even if cold fuel made the efficiency worse, the fact that it's denser and contained more energy than the hot fuel per volume could still make the results look like the colder fuel was more efficient when it was really just denser and you put more pounds of fuel in the tank.
It does help to a point. I've done it on car with a carburetor and fuel injection. Took a piece of copper pipe and wrapped smaller copper tubing around it, then spliced it into the radiator hose. What I found that works extremely well is a warm air intake. I removed the factory air box and replaced with a washable cone air filter. The air intake temperature difference is very noticeable. I drive about 500 miles a week so anything that improves mileage is worth it for me. Just removing the stock air box and replacing with a warm intake I've gained roughly about 3 miles per gallon. My intake Temps went from 30-40 degrees to around 75-100 depending on the temperature.
@@jamms992 Interesting, thanks for sharing! I wouldn't have thought that heating the fuel to the temperature of the coolant would work with a carburetor. My plan is to use a small stacked plate fluid to fluid heat exchanger inline with the small coolant circuit feeding the throttle body and run the fuel through that. My theory is with a coolant temperature of around 190 degrees, the fuel should be above its boiling point at atmospheric pressure and boil as soon as it gets sprayed into the intake manifold. But with the 50+ PSI of fuel pressure in the lines and rail, the fuel should still be well above its boiling point while its in the fuel system.
@@jamms992 a 1990 nissan sunny i had used to take its air from around the exhaust manifold. I always wondered why, cos no other manufacturer i saw did.
I don't think it matters. The fuel in the tank may be a certain temperature, but by the time it travels through the fuel system and gets atomized by the injectors or carburetor, It's at the ambient temperature of it's surroundings. Vapor lock is the real issue when fuel heats up.
1 rep for testing is not enough, and so fuel gets pressured and injected changing it's temperarute, but tuning would would make difference, as now car just tries to put proper afr, so it's no wonder it have similar times. But for cars consuming more fuel it can cool engine a little, and that would make difference in power. Here odometer is one hell of measurement.
Really air temp should be all that affects mileage. Colder air needs more fuel, that's why old cars had warm air pipes from the manifold for the carburetor. Better economy and was easier for the car to run once warmed up.
Run a peltier unit off the car's alternator to keep the gas cool while operating, and do a longer test to see how much more gas savings you get with the colder gas tank vs regular.
Gasoline density varies with temperature, so this wasn't just a test of temperature and engine performance; the amount of gasoline in the test tank varied slightly with each test. A gram scale would have shown this if the liter of fuel were weighed before each test. The bigger issue is ethanol, which would boil off while heating and during the test, but I'm not sure if Russian fuel contains ethanol. I wish that our fuel didn't.
In summers carb engines perform better as the air intake is naturally hot air through venturi makes better evaporated fumes and well fuel in tank specially on motorcycles one can feel the strong aroma of petrol emanating from tank. I presume the hot air makes lot of difference ..smooth engine better acceleration response...and perfect tuning of engine. It is because summers in Asia are terribly hot.
Just an video idea: have you trought About making High performance lada engine? Like custom made camshafts, High compression, ballanced rotating assembly? To see How it goes, maybe EFI kit Then second one without High compression And with turbo :) Would start with 1.5l maybe And try to bore it out
Older engines like the Lada would run best on 95, newer engines are happy on 91, buying fuel when it is cold means the fuel is more dense so you actually get more volume of fuel than on a Hot day. With petrol the liquid is not as dangerous as you might think, ( on YT i have seen a guy put out a burning match in petrol ) it is when it vapourizes it is VERY EXPLOSIVE 🔥💣💣🔥 Unsure of the boiling point of petrol all liquids have a different boiling point!
air temperature affetcs the cars power because cold air is denser than hot air (that why hot air ballons fly) and if denser the injection inject more fuel because there's more air, but i'm not sure that fuel temperature affects heavily the performances (perhaps with 500 hp but not with 50) the results about the consumption are strange but logic because at 70° fuel is way over its flash point (-43°) so at this temperature nearly all the fuel is transform into vapor
Many years ago there was this production motorcycle race known as the Castrol 6 hour and some of the teams cooled there petrol not for bettrr performance but chilled petrol shrinks and they woukd refuel the motorcycles with the cooled petrol and as they would go further on a tank of petrol and would refuel less and get an advantage over there competiters
Purely dependent on how the gasoline is stored. In most places tanks are deep enough underground that it isn't affected by the ambient air temps. Therefore negligible
