{"id":25635,"date":"2007-07-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-07-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisaclone.fapesp.br\/2007\/07\/01\/alcohol-conversion\/"},"modified":"2015-03-11T13:52:36","modified_gmt":"2015-03-11T16:52:36","slug":"alcohol-conversion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/alcohol-conversion\/","title":{"rendered":"Alcohol conversion"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"EDUARDO CESAR\/CTA<\/span>On October 19, 1976, three cars left the Technical Aerospace Center (CTA – \u00a0Centro T\u00e9cnico Aeroespacial) in the city of S\u00e3o Jos\u00e9 dos Campos (S\u00e3o Paulo state). They drove\u00a0 8,500 km across nine states and returned to their starting point 23 days later. Outwardly common-looking, the Dodge Polara 1800, the VW beetle 1300 and the Gurgel Xavante caused astonishment when it came to refueling: all three ran on alcohol rather than gasoline. The cars were part of \u00a0the Pro-Alcohol Caravan, the popular name of the National Integration Circuit, created to demonstrate the new fuel’s viability. “Whenever we filled up,\u00a0 a bunch of people gathered round to see if it really was alcohol”, says Adilson Cavichi do Amaral, driver of the pickup truck used to refuel the vehicles which followed the caravan together with another vehicle responsible for security. “Some people insisted on dipping their hand\u00a0 in and smelling it to make sure.”<\/p>\n

Pro\u00e1lcool, the National Alcohol Program, was officially created in 1975 and by decree, due to the major oil crisis in 1973. Its main objective was to reduce oil imports, sold at outrageous prices by the exporting countries. For the task of developing the alcohol engine, Jos\u00e9 Walter Bautista Vidal, then the head of the Industrial Technology Bureau of the Ministry of \u00a0Industry and Commerce, recruited engineer Urbano Stumpf, at that time a professor at the University of \u00a0Brasilia. An engineer from the first graduating class of ITA, the Aeronautics Technological Institute, Stumpf \u00a0had been researching the new fuel since the fifties. Together with a young engineering team gathered at the CTA, he began his studies on how to convert gasoline engines to alcohol.<\/p>\n

The group’s first job was to find out how much anhydrous alcohol one could mix into gasoline without loss of yield. With the engines of the 70’s, one could get to 15%, though the ideal level was 10%. Afterwards came\u00a0 studies on how to convert the engines – \u00a0the Volkswagen beetle was the car first chosen, as it was the country’s bestselling car. “Within one year, from 1975 to 1976, we developed a reliable conversion technology and Stumpf had the idea of this caravan, to prove that alcohol could replace gasoline, and had the advantage of being cheaper”,\u00a0 says engineer Paulo Ewal, head of the Piston Engines Subdivision of the CTA Aeronautics and Space Institute, now called the High Command of Aerospace Technology.<\/p>\n

A VW beetle 1300 was purchased; Jo\u00e3o Conrado do Amaral Gurgel, from Gurgel, lent a Xavante jeep (with a VW 1300 engine in it) and Chrysler, the only car manufacturer interested in the project,\u00a0 donated a Dodge 1800. After the caravan, the federal government decided to convert the engines of the state-owned companies? fleets. 731 VW beetles in total were converted. Telesp (the S\u00e3o Paulo State phone company) alone invested in 400 of them. It was only in 1979 that one car maker, Fiat, started manufacturing automobiles with alcohol engines as a factory-installed option, with its 147 Model.<\/p>\n

Of the three pioneering automobiles, only the Dodge remained,\u00a0 though it was sent to a scrap auction in 1986. “But we were warned by Amaral, the driver, and we persuaded the directors at the time to raise the Dodge’s price so that nobody would buy it and\u00a0 it would have to be returned to CTA”, says Jo\u00e3o Bosco Teixeira de Souza, one of the researchers in Stumpf’s team. “Unfortunately, we were unable to save the VW beetle, which became scrap.” \u00a0The Xavante was also lost. “As Gurgel’s production was very flexible, my father replaced the engine’s car easily in order to test new parts”, says Maria Cristina, Gurgel’s daughter. “He probably took a car from the factory’s fleet, replaced the engine and later converted it again to gasoline.” \u00a0 Since 2004, the Dodge has been at the Brazilian Aerospace Museum in the city of S\u00e3o Jos\u00e9 dos Campos, after 28 years of \u00a0lying around the many garages of various CTA divisions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Of the three cars that crisscrossed the country to publicize the new fuel in 1976, only one is still standing ","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[152],"tags":[],"coauthors":[104],"class_list":["post-25635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-retrospect"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25635\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25635"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=25635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}