-Removing the biomass limit is one of the great challenges to further enlarge the share of renewable ethanol as alternative for fossil fuels. One of the possible solutions for this constraint are the ternary GEM (Gasoline-Ethanol-Methanol) blends. The air-to-fuel ratio of these blends is hereby chosen at the value of an E85-blend (9.75 kg air/ kg fuel) while the ethanol is replaced by methanol/gasoline and therefore these blends are called 'isostoichiometric'. If the methanol is produced out of renewable sources, these blends can help extend the part of clean fuels on the market. The ternary blends show few differences in physical properties for the total range of possible blends and are considered as drop-in alternatives to the original E85-blend for a flex fuel engine. In this paper the performance and engine-out emissions of four of these GEM-blends were examined on a 4 cylinder 1.8 l PFI production engine. A single cylinder engine with high compression ratio was used for a preliminary study of the knock behavior of these blends. The measurement results are compared with those on neat gasoline, methanol and ethanol to demonstrate the potential of these ternary blends as a fossil fuel alternative. All the GEM fuels which were tested gave very similar results to E85 and can therefore indeed be used as 'drop-in' fuels for flex-fuel vehicles.

The spontaneous genesis of hydrocarbons that comprise natural petroleum have been analyzed by chemical thermodynamic-stability theory. The constraints imposed on chemical evolution by the second law of thermodynamics are briefly reviewed, and the effective prohibition of transformation, in the regime of temperatures and pressures characteristic of the near-surface crust of the Earth, of biological molecules into hydrocarbon molecules heavier than methane is recognized. For the theoretical analysis of this phenomenon, a general, first-principles equation of state has been developed by extending scaled particle theory and by using the technique of the factored partition function of the simplified perturbed hard-chain theory. The chemical potentials and the respective thermodynamic Affinity have been calculated for typical components of the H-C system over a range of pressures between 1 and 100 kbar (1 kbar ‫؍‬ 100 MPa) and at temperatures consistent with those of the depths of the Earth at such pressures. The theoretical analyses establish that the normal alkanes, the homologous hydrocarbon group of lowest chemical potential, evolve only at pressures greater than Ϸ30 kbar, excepting only the lightest, methane. The pressure of 30 kbar corresponds to depths of Ϸ100 km. For experimental verification of the predictions of the theoretical analysis, a special high-pressure apparatus has been designed that permits investigations at pressures to 50 kbar and temperatures to 1,500°C and also allows rapid cooling while maintaining high pressures. The high-pressure genesis of petroleum hydrocarbons has been demonstrated using only the reagents solid iron oxide, FeO, and marble, CaCO 3, 99.9% pure and wet with tripledistilled water. N atural petroleum is a hydrogen-carbon (H-C) system, in distinctly nonequilibrium states, composed of mixtures of highly reduced hydrocarbon molecules, all of very high chemical potential and most in the liquid phase. As such, the phenomenon of the terrestrial existence of natural petroleum in the near-surface crust of the Earth has presented several challenges, most of which have remained unresolved until recently. The primary scientific problem of petroleum has been the existence and genesis of the individual hydrocarbon molecules themselves: how, and under what thermodynamic conditions, can such highly reduced molecules of high chemical potential evolve?The scientific problem of the genesis of hydrocarbons of natural petroleum, and consequentially of the origin of natural petroleum deposits, regrettably has been one too much neglected by competent physicists and chemists; the subject has been obscured by diverse, unscientific hypotheses, typically connected with the rococo hypothesis (1) that highly reduced hydrocarbon molecules of high chemical potentials might somehow evolve from highly oxidized biotic molecules of low chemical potential. The scientific problem of the spontaneous evolution of the hydrocarbon molecules comprising natural petroleum is one of chemical thermodynamic-stability the...

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

By parametrizing the action integral for the standard Schrödinger equation we present a derivation of the recently proposed method for quantizing a parametrized theory. The reformulation suggests a natural extension from conventional to nonlinear quantum mechanics. This generalization enables a unitary description of the quantum evolution for a broad class of constrained Hamiltonian systems with a nonlinear kinematic structure. In particular, the new theory is applicable to the quantization of cosmological models where a chosen gravitational degree of freedom acts as geometric time. This is demonstrated explicitly using three cosmological models: the Friedmann universe with a massless scalar field and Bianchi type I and IX models. Based on these investigations, the prospect of further developing the proposed quantization scheme in the context of quantum gravity is discussed.