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Q&A

What would be a super fuel for methanol fuel dominating setting?

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Tech level - comparable to contemporary; no fossil fuels, all fuel has to be produced synthetically, as simplest to produce (and store!!!) was selected methanol.

Theoretically quite good - superior octane ranting (109), do not boils easily (~60C). Anyway, it has one very serious drawback - low energy density (less than half of normal petrol).

Nevertheless such setting asks for some kind of superfuel, that would be used for especially demanding tasks (military, long distance piston engine aircraft) where price would not be a big issue. Such fuel would have to have the following properties:

-be possible to be used in multifuel engines which normally accept methanol

-do not have seriously worse octane rating or boiling point than methanol

-have much better energy density

-do not have be ecologic

1) It seems that the best what I could find was some variant of avgas, with awful high lead content. Realistic or not specially? (or what other thing would be better?)

2) What would be the difference in using such fuel, except better range? Would such high energy fuel provide higher horse power than methanol? Or just engine would have to use less, because of some other liming factors (like amount of oxygen or endurance of such engine)

(I assumed that if engines are being optimized for high octane fuel, then any its high quality replacement would also have to be high octane, if that's not the case please correct me)

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/68808. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

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