With the increasingly (and somewhat government mandated) use of alcohol in US gasoline, I am reminded of some respiratory distress from sitting in a traffic jam in Brazil. The fumes were, well incredible, and while I may accept evaporating gasoline isn’t any better (or maybe even worse) and maybe cars in Brazil aren’t so tight (well maybe a lot don’t have their gas caps, stealing fuel from they neighbor wasn’t covered by Moses apparently), I can’t help but feel that the pain (and yes it was pain) in my lungs had something to do with sun light reacting with the fumes.
Is it required that congressmen from the corn belt go to Brazil and try to drive from Sao Paulo to Brazilia at rush hour?
They’re not unless you are outside of a city and the military police stop you on the way to the beach and give you the option to pay your fine on the spot for not having your fire extinguisher readily accessible from the front seat.
Sorry. my real question essentially was ethanol fumes + sunlight, I was being a bit (or very) oblique.
I am pretty sure ethanol is not chemically affected by sunlight, except inasmuch as heat will tend to increase its rate of evaporation. You may have been smelling the ethanol fumes, but my guess is that your respiratory distress was caused by other pollutants produced by the vehicles (Brazilian cars do not run on pure ethanol, do they?), and that the sunlight had nothing to do with it. Of course, being too hot may also have contributed to your discomfort.
Anyway, what you say is scarcely meaningful. VOC just means “volatile organic compound”, of which there are a huge number, all with different chemistries. The reactivity of some of them will certainly be affected by sunlight, and there may even be some that will release ozone in reaction with nitrogen oxides (or otherwise), but certainly most of them will not, and you have given no reason to think that ethanol is one that will. From my understanding of the chemistry of ethanol, it will not.
Nitrogen oxides, on the other hand, will irritate the lungs all by themselves, never mind ozone. Quite possibly they were what caused the OP’s distress. Again, though, teh sunlight is beside the point.
Well…yes as a matter of fact many Brazilian cars run on pure ethanol (give or take some additives). The minimum amount of ethanol in gasoline is 25% (as I remember). Commercial drivers (especially taxi drivers) carry around a hand calculator to figure out if they should fuel up with alcohol or gasoline at any given fuel stop, taking into account mileage, price, etc. They might make a judgement call if the additional range provided by gasoline (maybe there aren’t so many stations along their route) is a factor. Anyway by law, if you want to sell a car in Brazil it better at least in theory run on pure ethanol.
That brings me to another question. They sell cars which can run on gasoline, CNG, LPG or ethanol there. US companies like GM sell them. They are planning to bring this technology to the US when?
We have had it for years. When enough people want it, more alternate fuel and multi-fuel cars will be sold. I don’t know the extent across the country, but plenty of people are using an ethanol/gasoline mix already since that’s what’s available at the pump.
They actually can run all four fuels (but you’ve got to manually switch from CNG/LPG and alcohol-gasoline for obvious reasons) in the same car. They use (from MULTIPLE manufactures like GM, Renault) a capacitance sensor to figure out the alcohol-gas mixture and simply which inlet pipe between discern between CNG and LPG (but there is some other sensor which helps determine the butane-propane ration in LPG).
I’m bot saying I’d actually buy one of them to be honest, but people who would (say if they combined this with a hybrid) might like the fact that at the end of the summer, lets hook the propane tank up to the car.