And the coal fired electical plants are cleaner than our automobiles, not to mention that many of them are now fired with natural gas.

The methanol burns cleaner with less pollution, but puts out more carbon dioxide for the same work. Just on the news yesterday some British person was trying to get E85 banned in Britan because it was worse for the u know what crisis.

It also means it has more carbon and less hydrogen so more carbon dioxide, but about the same as far as pollution.

Actually, more carbon and more hydrogen. Either way it breaks down into three components, water, CO2 and heat (not including the oil). Of course water vapor is the number one greehouse gas but there isn't much we can do to limit that. It is still far less pollution then gasoline with its huge complex HC's and benzene rings being broken down.

methanol/ethanol requires more energy to produce than it makes and
then requires farm land to produce...

The 55ax bio-fuel is a PC answer and looking for a problem...

A few years back NASA had a very large electric think wingspan was over 100 ft solar film panels in the wing ceiling 100,000 ft ?? drone elctric power panels recharged the batteries stayed up for months do not know if still up there or not. Anything that burns alcohol, gas. diesel, even your wood campfires give off carbon dioxide martin

I think that if you consider emissions by engine displacement the model engine is far more pollutant than anything out there. Consider the fact that the engines are always run rich of stoich. Glow engines use a rich mixture to hold back detonation. In such a small cylinder combustion efficiency is pretty poor. I don't know what nitromethane does to emissions, but would be interesting to find out. A 2 stroke glow engine is about 11% efficient at best. OS's move with PVC and other things is in my opinion a preemptive effort on their part to avoid regulation. One would just need to figure out how many gallons of fuel are sold to get an idea of what kind of pollution occurs. but in the grand scheme of things vehicles will always be number one pollution contributors by volume.

At least castor oil and methanol are bio products. So we are pretty much emissions neutral in that regard.

It will be quite a while before you have to buy carbon credits to fly model aircraft.

Think I will sell Carbon Credits to Modlers....that should make you all feel better[:@]

Nitromethane will add some NOx to the exhaust but is likely to be less of a factor in overall emissions then the oil mixed in with the fuel. Either way
I don't think anyone is going to be coming after us for these. I would hope not anyway.

I'd betcha that the fumes belched out by the "Top Fuel" and "Alcohol" dragsters/funny cars at one major drag race would be more than we as modelers put out in a whole year...

LOL, no kidding. Have you ever seen "tractor racing" on espn 2. I turned it on oneday and they were racing in dirt while hauling some huge trailer. The only thing was (and this was quite funny to watch) that a 10ft stream of BLACK [X(] exhaust was rocketing into the air.

Actually our engines don't have enough peak combustion temp to make NOx. The nitrogen in partially burned nitromethane becomes nitric acid instead, which from an environmental aspect is good, because the nitric acid burns off in the exhaust stream.

Sport Pilot, what is NOx?

At about 1800 degrees you will start to get NOx, I haven't put a thermistor on mine so I don't know if they get that hot. I know snowmobile 2 cycles push 1400 and they run at less rpm and is liquid cooled. NOx are nitrogen oxides created in combustion. They are associated with the acid rain issue as the rise into the atmosphere and mix with water vapor it creates an acid condition. Below 1800, the nitrogen gets pushed through as N2 as there isn't enough heat to force the NOx bonds.

Thats right and with the stoichmetric [link=http://www.derose.net/steve/resources/engtables/flametemp.html]combustion temp[/link] being just over that, it is unlikely that very many model engines ever develop NOx. You would have to have the perfect glow plug temp to do so.

Not engines gives pollution only, your farthing are pollution too

To preventing NOx out of engine are the exhaust recirculation used to lower combustion temperature. About 10-15% exhaust are entered into the intake manifold , then mixed with fuel mixture before combustion start. The EGR valve are controlled by ECU.

Horse hockey The pollution from the the quart or so of fuel I burn in a day is nothing compared to the 4 gallons of gas I burn to & from the field & the 2 gal of gas it takes to mow the field in a well used mower- which burns lube oil too.

Bill Teller

Bill,

I'm was wondering about those claims too. Well said.

I wasn't intending to start any kind argument, i was just wondering what polution these engines put out.

Ah, that explains why it seems a little bit nicer around here now........

j/k

Okay talking about model pollution, how about those 3D monsters that stay in one spot spewing huge clouds of burnt oil smoke?

I think the point of the thread was what these engines put out for pollution, not them compared to every other pollution creating device out there.

Yea, they put out a drop in the bucket!

Does hovering in one spot produce more exhaust than when moving?

No, same amount but it's not getting left behind so it looks like a lot. A couple of times when running an engine on the test stand I've plugged a radiator hose with a 90 degree bend over the muffler to get the exhaust out of the prop slip stream and it's amazing how much smoke there is.

Yeah...you can really notice it if you test run one of your engines down in your basement...[sm=lol.gif][sm=spinnyeyes.gif]
(or in your brothers garage, because it's winter and too cold to go out in the below zero weather...)

I generally put a test bench out on the driveway adjacent to the garage, if I point the prop blast to the garage the smoke detectors go off. If we were to get rid of the oil, or use four strokes with the oil sealed in the crankcase, we would have much cleaner burning engines.