Ethanol is rocket fuel

Ethanol is not a fad, nor a flash in the pan fuel that some Johnny-come-lately scientist dreamed up to save humanity from the oil companies. Distillers all over the world have been making this go-juice for a long time. In Canada, GreenField Ethanol  produces 100% ethyl alcohol using corn, the same organic material that Kentucky moonshiners have been mashing for over one hundred and fifty years. Ethyl alcohol is a colourless, pleasant smelling substance that has been lighting lamps all over America since the 1850s, and the infant automobile industry suckled on this vegetable matter in the early 1900’s before it grew into the petroleum fed monster it has since become.

Would it surprise you to know that pure ethyl alcohol was in fact mankind’s first liquid rocket fuel? It’s true – Nazi Germany refined ethanol from sugar beets and used its energy to propel their dreaded V2 rockets towards England in the darkest days of World War II.

Rockets move forward by expelling mass backwards (Newton's Third Law ). The early visionaries, Robert Goddard in the United States, and Werner Von Braun in  Germany both identified pure hydrogen as the best possible fuel for their first hobby rockets. But hydrogen gas was really expensive in 1937, and the Hindenburg Disaster scared everyone away from using this volatile element. German scientists working on their ‘vengeance weapon’ on the Isle of Peenemunde chose ethanol as its primary fuel source because it was good, fast and cheap. 

Remember the Germans had a fuel shortage in the 1940s. The Allies blockaded German ports and cut off all crude oil imports to restrict Hitler’s ability to conduct mobile warfare. It might have worked except that two decades earlier, Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch pioneered a method for making diesel fuel from coal gas, and the Ruhr valley had lots of coal. 

The Fischer Tropsch process still gets a lot of attention today - some people think it’s a viable solution to America’s emerging energy crises. It isn’t. The hydrogenation of coal is neither efficient nor environmentally friendly. This was something the Germans had to do, and hopefully something North Americans can avoid.

Propelled by a mixture of ethanol and liquid oxygen, the V-2 rocket was the fastest weapon in the Nazi arsenal and could carry a thousand kilogram warhead over three hundred kilometers. The turbo fuel pumps inside the fuselage were driven by hydrogen peroxide. The ethanol was kept in an aluminum tank to save weight. Making that tank further drained the German war economy as this exotic metal was both rare and valuable.

An ingenious design, ethanol was pumped through the walls of the main burner to simultaneously preheat the fuel and cool the combustion apparatus. The propellant was then pumped down into the main reaction chamber through several nozzles which assured the correct mixture of alcohol and liquid oxygen at all times.

At the end of World War II, the most valuable treasure taken from Germany was the rocket scientists themselves. These men gave the USA a real advantage over the Soviet Union in the Cold War that followed. It’s therefore not surprising that America’s first Redstone rockets also used ethanol combined with liquid oxygen as fuel. In fact it wasn’t until 1956 that other more exotic propellants were developed. Today the US Space Shuttle’s liquid fueled rocket engines burn hydrogen – just as Robert Goddard and Werner von Braun had anticipated. But at the dawn of rocketry, ethanol was the fuel of choice - just as it was at the beginning of the Automobile Age.

I laugh at those critics that claim ethanol is weaker than gasoline, and I challenge those who believe their cars will have less power on the road. Try ethanol and you will discover it’s just not true. Yes, mileage per liter is slightly reduced, but alcohol burns cleaner and hotter than gasoline, and delivers just as much power. Heck, ethanol is rocket fuel!

Comments

[casual net surfer]

energy/volume in ethanol is less than that in gasoline. you can build an engine that gives the same power per ethanol energy as our gas engines give per gas energy, but they will still consume about 30% more volume of fuel, and ethanol is more expensive than gasoline. As for the rocket aspect, the oxidizer is just as important as the fuel. liquid oxygen is quite a different oxidizer than compressed air. with a little potassium nitrate, a snickers bar makes decent rocket fuel.

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indy cars run on methanol