ORIGINAL: SeaJay
And Just for us curious types, how is it difficult to believe that the gas engine can produce more power than the Methanol based fuels, considering that gasoline has about 45.7 MJ/Kg of energy VS Methanol at 22.03 MJ/Kg energy? By my calculation, that is a little over double the potential energy!! Granted, the gasoline must be run at a much leaner fuel/air ratio for proper combustion, but I still don't see why there might be some advances that would allow a gasoline powered engine to be of equal (more or less) power of that of a glow (methanol) fueled engine!
Craig.
Because you can run over three times as much methanol per volume of air, giving much higher energy per stroke despite the large amount of fuel used. The only way you can do that with gasoline is if the methanol engine has some defect (such as poor timing from limited availability of the right glow plut) or with an oxidizer to allow richer mixutres of gasoline.