I work in oil refining. In the last 20 years refiners have invested billions of dollars into equipment to remove BTX. Is there some still present? Yes, but at very minimal levels. The days of jacking up aromatic(BTX) levels to increase octane is long gone and the EPA mandates this.
Higher octane fuels do not burn slower.... in fact if they did it would lower their octane rating. Detonation takes heat and time to manifest itself. Anything you do to slow down combustion increase the risk of Detonation.
Putting a match into a hydrocarbon doesn't prove anything. Detonation isn't normal combustion, it's abnormal combustion....
""""""CAUSED BY HEAT AND PRESSURE."""""""
I just finished half a sentence there ;-)
And yes I have taken both organic and inorganic chemistry in HS and college. You are talking about theory and I am telling you that in practice premium and 87 have the same energy content depending on the time you take the sample. The thing you must consider is there is no recipe or formula for gasoline. It's a chemical soup of a variety of components that are constantly blended to hit a performance specification. Some refinery streams are poor quality and some are high quality, but at the end of the day they all will be blended and nothing is wasted.
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A lot of what this gentlemen says I won't agree with but on this bit I will indeed endorse the facts of it's all about quality control to achieve generally homogeneous gas that when mixed or remixed blends seamlessly most times.
I know this to be true by fact in practice not fiction or he said she said stuff. We used to make higher octane gas by blending certain grades of Exxon Fuel with other manufactures based on the chemical composition our machinists buddy actual had the fuels all tested for content. Then another guy, probably a chemist, figured out how to blend this with that so we ended up with 95 octane pump gas just to run high static compression ratios on the street in the 80's and 90's. We did all this with bi-yearly testing updates to stay up on the game. I personally found, imo mine only, that higher concentrations of NTBE over 15% degrade rubber parts and the old cheap plastic carb bowl washers turn to mush on Holley AM clear washers. This combined with ethanol I believe is a major leading cause of rubber failures under heated up engine operating conditions when mixed with gasoline. We know E10 does a number on parts by etching over time like brass or aluminum. That still doesn't account for rubber segregation, disintegration and dry cracking or black death snot. E10 with other nasties and added heat just might.
So we made less power with higher octane but avoided detonation and saved some parts. Octane as stated above is just a retardant nothing more. Oxygen in the fuel is where the real power is if your purely interested in making more with less not octane increasing additives. Remember it IS just an additive for a specific outcome it really increases nothing.
Any test not directly performed on a running engine are near worthless in my experiences. Ether in fuel probably causes more issues then all the rest combined with damage being the end result but why?...
In a nutshell, damaging light ends that infiltrate nearly everything synthetic or rubber related. They carry away the heavier petroleum oils preset in soft materials. Damage done and not reversible.
