The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 225
salt shaker. In a general full definition of "hygroscopic," a hygroscopic substance can attract moisture from its environment. So you have wrongfully translated that to "ethanol sucks water right out of the air." The word "environment"
means "near" or "adjacent", it doesn't mean "air." The word "attract" doesn't
mean "absorbs" or "sucks."
There are two ways to prove this: Fill a drinking glass halfway with alcohol and
leave it on your kitchen counter overnight (or a couple of days). If alcohol could
attract water right out of the air the drinking glass would have more liquid in it
as the days pass. But it won't have more liquid (it'll actually have less liquid).
2nd test: Place a dry cotton ball on your kitchen counter and let it sit overnight.
The cotton ball is a hygroscopic substance. If it could suck moisture right out of
the air the cotton ball will get wet. But it won't. However, if you place the dry
cotton ball "adjacent" to a small puddle of any liquid it will absorb the liquid in a
'wicking' process.
Next points: For some reason, you have forgotten or never learned, that if your
gasoline tank developed some water (usually through the natural process of
condensation), you would use a product such as Dry Gas to solve the problem.
Dry Gas is ethanol. If ethanol caused water to form, Dry Gas wouldn't be used
to get rid of the water. Ethanol gets rid of the water problem by breaking up the
water into molecules and allows ignition to take place. When the engine then
runs it expels the water molecules in the exhaust. The gumming up and "varnish" comes as a result of the burnt gasoline residue. The ethanol works as a
solvent to get rid of the gasoline residue and varnish. The result may be to turn
the gasoline residue/varnish into a gummy substance, but over the course of
time any internal combustion engine will experience this problem and need to
be cleaned. You would then use an alcohol-based product or a product that
emulates alcohol's solvent characteristics. This has been true since the birth of
internal combustion engines. The whole point of having a gasoline that has a
"detergent" is to do what ethanol does...but ethanol does it better.
If you have only ever used ethanol-free gasoline then your engine has a lot of
residue. If you suddenly switch to an ethanol blend you may find that there is
an overwhelming amount of gunk that is just too much for the usual running
engine to handle on its own. But blaming the problem on ethanol would be like
blaming a clogged drain in your bathroom sink on the soap for doing too good
of a job. In any event, once the engine is cleaned out the ethanol blend will help
keep the engine clean. To explain the varnish thing better: If you ever worked
with a piece of finished wood, and you wanted to remove the varnish, you would
