Hello All,

Let me say up front that this might not be workable (I'm not an expert on petroleum chemistry), but a thought occurred to me that just might "kill two birds with one stone" regarding both RP-1 (rocket-grade kerosene) production costs and the low-sulfur diesel fuel requrement for U.S. road vehicles (which prevents the European high-mileage diesel vehicles from being sold here).

RP-1 is a highly-refined, low-sulfur kerosene that can in theory be refined from any grade of crude oil, but in practice it is only refined from light sweet crude oil because of the amount of refinement that is required. If (and it's an admittedly big "if" in this case) techniques were developed to refine RP-1 from other, lower grades of crude oil, and if RP-1 would also meet the low-sulfur requirement for diesel road fuel (I think it is even cleaner than what the requirement stipulates), this could be a "Win-Win" situation for both the automobile industry and the aerospace industry, particularly if the RP-1 per-gallon price fell as a result of improved refinement techniques making it available in larger quantities. What d'y'all think?

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NAR #54895 SR

Kerosene used to be a common fuel in tractors years ago. They were often set up to run on gasoline until they got warm, then switched over to kerosene. The guy that bales my hay used to pull his hay rake with an old Farmall that was duel fuel.

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I love sanding.

Interesting! I had never heard of that, but I'm not surprised, given something that my father once accidentally did. He filled up one of our lawn mowers with kerosene, and he didn't realize his mistake until he had finished mowing the yard and put the mower away (he noticed an unusual exhaust odor, but he was in a hurry to finish the yard--it was his day off duty from the Fire Station). He was stunned that the mower ran just fine on the kerosene, and with no damage (although he didn't tempt fate by doing it again), and subsequent runnings on gasoline revealed no problems from its one-time operation using kerosene.

__________________
Black Shire--Draft horse in human form, model rocketeer, occasional mystic, and writer, see:
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All of my book proceeds go to the Northcote Heavy Horse Centre www.northcotehorses.com.
NAR #54895 SR

My son did the same thing once when he was mowing his grandparents' yard. He said it didn't run quite as good as usual, but not bad enough to think something was wrong. My dad, a life-long auto and industrial mechanic, just laughed when my son told him what he'd done.

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I love sanding.

I guess in both cases, they accidentally mixed up batches of wide-cut (*REALLY* wide-cut!) JP-5!

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Black Shire--Draft horse in human form, model rocketeer, occasional mystic, and writer, see:
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperba...an-form/8075185
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http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6126511
All of my book proceeds go to the Northcote Heavy Horse Centre www.northcotehorses.com.
NAR #54895 SR

If we're going to entertain this wild idea can we at least use JP-7 so we can use it in scramjets in a pinch?

Thanks.

Jerry

Mixing a little kerosene in gasoline or diesel fuel will clear deposits, so it's actually a good thing...

With modern engines though, as finicky as they can be with all the anti-pollution crap and sensors on them, it's probably not a good idea.

Back when I was a kid, Dad had a 77 Ford pickup with the old inline 6, the 300 cu.in. one... we had gas wells here on the farm and they had distillate tanks set up to catch whatever came out of the separator before it went into the pipeline... mostly light liquid hydrocarbons, also known as "drip gas" or distillate... we were goofing around in the field and he took some jugs down there and opened the drain valve on the tank a bit and collected some distillate from the tank, took the jugs halfway back to the house, and then took an old mayonnaise jar lid and poured a bit of distillate in the lid, took it 10-15 feet away, and lit it up... burned mostly clear and hot... so he poured the distillate into his pickup and ran it on distillate going to his job at the nuke plant... ran like a champ! He did that fairly often for a couple years until the wells started producing more salt water and we didn't have a way to skim the distillate off the top of the salt water in the tanks...

Later! OL JR

PS. I got pretty PO'd a couple years ago when going to Indiana and saw the price of gas jump about 30 cents from Missouri to Illinois, and jump another 10 cents more in Indiana... I was on fumes and still 100 miles or so from the MIL's so I put 1/4 tank of regular in the truck, turned the pump off, and then restarted it and filled the tank the rest of the way with E-85... Ran like a champ. So much for "flex fuel" vehicles... LOL The sensors should get "close enough" anyway... Heck, my old 92 F-150 with the 300 inline 6, back in 98-99 I was up in Iowa visiting my girlfriend at the time and decided to go home via Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado, since I'd never been north of Colorado before... gas was pretty expensive in Iowa compared to what we were used to down here, so before I left I filled BOTH tanks of the pickup brimming full of ethanol from the local station in town... man that truck just seemed to run FOREVER on that stuff... drove all the way across Iowa, across part of Minnesota, and nearly all the way across South Dakota on that ethanol... and this truck was a plain-jane old gasser model-- no flex fuel... ran like a top... Of course once I got to South Dakota there were no more ethanol stations so I switched back to gasoline, but the mileage wasn't as good on the gas as it had been on the ethanol...

As for rockets, someone was talking about "green" propellants for rockets... wonder how biodiesel would work??

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Isn't that stuff toxic (containing boron compounds or something of that nature)? The SR-71's tankers' J-57 engines could run on JP-7 if necessary, but the crews were advised to avoid it unless their JP-4 reserves ran very low. Cheaper RP-1 would be a boon to SpaceX and ULA.

__________________
Black Shire--Draft horse in human form, model rocketeer, occasional mystic, and writer, see:
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperba...an-form/8075185
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6122050
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6126511
All of my book proceeds go to the Northcote Heavy Horse Centre www.northcotehorses.com.
NAR #54895 SR

Indeed--it works like Marvel Mystery Oil to clean deposits (here in Alaska in the winter, many folks add a cupful or so to their oil during their winter oil changes--it penetrates and loosens deposits and burns away gradually, later being replaced with a "top-off" of regular winter-weight motor oil).

The distillates sounded like shorter-chain alkanes (or a mixture of them, maybe with some butane dissolved in it)--they would burn fine in an engine. Also:

The only negative things I've read about ethanol and E-85 are that, being "dry" fuels, the rubber seals in older (non flex-fuel) engines tend to need replacement more often because they aren't "moistened" with those fuels as they are with gasoline or diesel (but ethanol/E-85-compatible seals are available). Also, those fuels are hygroscopic, BUT--if a largely-empty tank gets that way, more ethanol or E-85 can be added to absorb the excess water, and the fuel will burn in the engine, taking the water with it. In addition:

A Vietnam veteran taught me how to ensure that my 1981 GMC pickup would pass our (now-repealed) pollution test, using alcohol. As part of a 20-gallon fill-up with regular unleaded, I added 1 gallon of ethanol (ethyl alcohol) and 1 gallon of isopropyl alcohol (*not* the drug store-grade stuff, which contains a significant percentage of water). As I watched the TV in the customers' lounge at the garage where I had the inspection done, I heard one mechanic say to another, "There's -got- to be something wrong with our test equipment--the exhaust from this old truck *can't* be that clean!" I just kept staring at that TV set... :-) As well:

Regarding using biodiesel in rockets, a similar bio-jet fuel has been tested sucessfully, so it should be possible. Dependng on the mixture and viscosity, it might even be possible to make "bio-paraffin" solid fuel grains for LOX/paraffin hybrid rockets of the type that Premier Space Systems (see: http://premierspacesystems.com/ ) is developing.

__________________
Black Shire--Draft horse in human form, model rocketeer, occasional mystic, and writer, see:
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperba...an-form/8075185
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6122050
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6126511
All of my book proceeds go to the Northcote Heavy Horse Centre www.northcotehorses.com.
NAR #54895 SR

The main problem with RP-1 in rocket engines is coking... not sure how biodiesel or some rocket derivative would work in that situation... FWIU, they've pretty much got the coking situation licked anyway for reusable kerolox engines...

Hmmm... bioparaffin... might be a good use for all that glycerin you get as a byproduct from biodiesel production...

Later! OL JR

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The X-87B Cruise Basselope-- THE Ultimate Weapon in the arsenal of Homeland Security and only $52 million per round!