Iranian companies have increased the production of bi-fuel vehicles as part of a plan to manufacture fewer gasoline-powered engines.

"Iranian automakers have produced more than 120,000 vehicles that use natural gas and regular gasoline in the first quarter of the current Iranian year (March 20-June 20)," Minister of Industries and Mines Ali Akbar Mehrabian said.

Flexible-fuel vehicle (FFV) or dual-fuel vehicle is an alternative fuel automobile with a multifuel engine that can typically use different sources of fuel which are either mixed in the same tank or with separate tanks and fuel systems for each fuel.

A common example is a vehicle that can accept gasoline mixed with varying levels of bioethanol.

Some cars such as bi-fuel carry a natural gas tank making it possible to switch back and forth from gasoline to natural gas. Bi-fuel vehicles have separate tanks for gasoline and the gaseous fuel.

Dual-fuel systems supply both fuels into the combustion chamber at the same time in various calibrated proportions.

Production
Iranian car manufacturers, including the country's number one automaker Iran Khodro, have increased the production of cars that utilize both gasoline and compressed natural gas (CNG) by about 20-fold over the past two years.

"Bi-fuel car production reached 429,000 units last year from 20,000 two years earlier," Mehrabian said at the First National Conference on CNG in Tehran (August 2 to 3).

According to Presstv, the boom in bi-fuel car production has been encouraged by the government in a bid to reduce dependence on gasoline.

Iran, the world's fourth-largest oil producer, lacks adequate refining capacity to produce gasoline and spends huge sums on imports, which burdens state coffers. The country introduced a gasoline rationing program in June 2007 to reduce the excessive gasoline consumption.

"Sixty percent of passenger cars produced this year will use natural gas or they will be bi-fuel; the remaining 40 percent will run on regular gasoline," read a Cabinet statement released in June 2008.

The decision, effective this year (ends March 20, 2009) came in the wake of sweeping revisions announced in the gasoline rationing plan on June 7. Among the changes was a measure that required owners of luxury vehicles to purchase premium gasoline at market prices as of June 21 instead of heavily subsidized regular unleaded fuel.

Flex Fuel Car
Since the oil crisis in the 70's, Brazil has been selling ethanol as a fuel. Car manufacturers modified gasoline engines to support ethanol characteristics and have been selling ethanol powered cars since then. However, flexible fuel technology started being developed only at the end of the 90's.

The flexible fuel car is built with an ethanol-ready engine and one fuel tank. The lambda probe, used to measure the quality of combustion in conventional engines, is also required to tell the engine control unit (ECU)which blend of gasoline and alcohol is being burnt.

So, the controller regulates the amount of fuel injected and the spark time: fuel flow needs to be decreased and also self-combustion needs to be avoided when gasoline is used.

In May 2003, Volkswagen built for the first time a flexible fuel car, the Gol 1.6 Total Flex. Chevrolet followed two months later with the Corsa 1.8 Flexpower, using an engine developed by a joint venture with Fiat called PowerTrain.

There's another type of flexible fuel vehicle that is not uncommon. Those are the cars able to switch from gasoline to natural gas. The term 'flex fuel', however is never used to describe those cars; instead, they are called bi-fueled vehicles or tri-fueled if they are built with an ethanol-gasoline flexible fuel engine.

CNG
In Iran, natural gas shares a small part of the fuel market with gasoline and diesel. It has the advantages of having government incentives for cars with such systems and being cheaper in the country.

The disadvantages are a slight reduction of engine power, the small number of gas stations that supply this fuel, having the lowest mileage and the space needed for the cylinder (one or two) installation, normally taking up a good amount of space in the trunk.

Trucks and pickups in Iran are mostly diesel powered and there's no project on their conversion to some kind of flexible fuel system yet.

© Iran Daily 2008

Share this on:        Delicious         Digg         reddit         Facebook         StumbleUpon

 

 

Community Comments (0) - Comment on this article

The opinions of the authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect Zawya. Read our Comment Policy.

 

 

 

close x

Loading ...

 

close x

Loading ...