I want to see a car engine run off of Triptane. I had a college professor who was the chief fuel consultant for NHRA for 25years who said that he almost recieved a barrel of it from a friend but his friend sadly passed away before being able to aquire some. He was an interesting dude. Here's a article Popular Hotrodding had on him.
DR. DEAN HILL
New Mexico State University
Dr. Hill is a professor of mechanical engineering at New Mexico State University (
www.nmsu.edu) and was the principal fuel consultant to NHRA for 25 years. He has published many magazine tech articles and SAE papers on fuels, and he consults directly for many race teams. He also builds and races his own drag cars in Stock and Injected Fuel classes. His broad knowledge of fuel chemistry provided the basis for his AETC discussion, and the attendees learned plenty about gasoline, from its chemical structure to its burn rates. There's much to gain from ingesting this vast amount of information, and Dean's easygoing nature helped make a complex subject much more fun to comprehend. Gasoline is, in chemical terms, a paraffin hydrocarbon. The other members of this "family" should be familiar to PHR readers, and you'll soon see a direct relationship amongst many of our favorite fuels.
Depending on the structure of the carbon atoms, different types of fuel are produced. The more carbon atoms there are connected in the molecular chain, the more time it takes for all of these bonds to break during combustion. For example, the fuels with less carbon bonds, like ethane (two carbon atoms), propane (three carbon atoms), butane (four carbon atoms), pentane (five), hexane (six), heptane (seven), and octane (eight) are easy enough to understand and figure out. Hey, we said octane! Now there's a word we know and can relate to. While different octane numbers are assigned to various grades of gasoline, we can now relate to the ratings with a bit more authority. As we add more carbon atoms, fuel burn rates keep slowing down. After the octanes, we move into diesel fuels like nonane and hexadecane, which contain much longer carbon strings and take much longer to burn.
While it may foster flashbacks to the hell of high school chemistry for some, we hope others can better understand what Dr. Hill was trying to do. By educating enthusiasts on the building blocks of gasoline, we'd be better able to understand a most-basic element of what motivates us; liquid gasoline! Dean also answered one of our lingering questions: What is the octane of nitromethane? The answer was as intriguing as the question. While nitro may only have an octane rating of 75 or so, it does not burn. It explodes, and therein lies the key to its mystery. By not burning and rather exploding at a violent rate, nitro sidesteps the smooth combustion issues street enthusiasts wrestle with, and this explains why it performs like it does.
Dean also told us about a lead-based ultra-killer fuel we'd never heard of before: triptane. This represents the best gasoline possible, with a performance octane rating of 150 and the ability to support supercharged engines with 16:1 static compression ratios without detonation. Used as a performance booster to assist fully-loaded WWII American bombers on takeoff, this amazing fuel contains 6 ml of tetra-ethyl lead per-gallon, and cost $5,000 a drum in the '40s. While it's illegal to manufacture now, it was really cool to see how good gasoline could be if refined to its ultimate potential.
