ABSTRACT
Ethanol has long been recognized as a high-quality transportation fuel. It can be used in low-level gasoline blends for unmodified vehicles designed to run on gasoline, or in higher-level blends for dedicated or flexible fuel vehicles (FFVs). Ethanol's advantages in power, energy efficiency, and emission performance are recognized when compared to conventional diesel or gasoline fuels now used predominantly for transportation. A combination of new cellulosic biomass production technology with advanced utilization technology for ethanol vehicles may result in ethanol's developing a significant market share in the global transportation fuel market. Each fuel has its own set of intrinsic properties that play a major role in determining performance in an engine. Intrinsic chemical and physical properties such as energy density, heat of vaporization, molecular ratio of reactants to combustion products, specific energy, flammability limits, flame speed and temperature, and hydrogen and carbon content, directly affect engine performance.
