I hate to be a debby downer here, but I will stick my constant assertion that IAT graphs are irrelevant when spraying anything on the temperature sensor. Spraying water and air at high velocity over a thermometer, let alone alcohol, will show a much cooler temperature then what the actual combustion chamber experiences. This is why you can go below ambient air temp on your IAT graphs. Your combustion chamber is not seeing below ambient IAT and neither is your intake manifold for that matter, only your sensor is due to evaporation.
Evaporation skews these measurements considerably. That is not to say that the evaporation isn't also cooling the other components through energy transfer, but you can't compare the delta of a minuscule filament versus a huge aluminum intake manifold. The temp sensor thinks things are cooler then they, dumps on even more timing, the methanol acts as a catalyst of sorts and increase the efficiency of the combustion process, the car makes more power. No arguments there, but IAT graphs taken from the stock IAT sensor are not an accurate representation of how much methanol or alcohol actually cools the intake stream.
Unfortunately, this is always a bit hard to prove, since measuring takes an instrument and most instruments require direct contact with the stream.
Originally Posted by
protocol_droid
That's news to me as I work with solvents on a daily basis with measuring.
That's because the difference is relatively insignificant, and methanol or ethanol can evaporate at a higher rate then the miscibility.
While I don't go sloshing gallons of methanol around in my home, most of us do not break out scientific beakers and such when we fill our windshield wiper fluid bottle (you really want to keep 100% meth in that?). If you take a 2L bottle and fill it with water, and a 2L bottle and fill it with Methanol, you will still be at basically 50%. The flashpoint and performance difference of being 49/51 water to meth compared to 50/50 is extremely small. Once you start getting into the 60% or more methanol, is when things begin to become dangerous, and exponentially more so as the percentage rises.
We NEVER recommend anyone use more then 50% methanol in their cars, especially with cheaper systems that use push fittings and such; just don't feel the meth systems are safe enough to use this on the street with such a dangerous fluid. 100% methanol is incredibly flammable, burns with no visible flame, has a low flash point, and all it takes is a small nick in a line to be spraying it all over a red hot exhaust manifold.
For all intensive purposes, 50/50 mix is made with 50% water, 50% methanol.
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