Talk:Gasoline/Archive 1

message: --QUESTION
What is the generated heat (J/kg) obtained by burning gasoline?
--ANSWER
 Fuel      kJ/g     kwh/kg
 Kerosene  48       15.5
 Gasoline  50
 Diesel    45       15.5
--QUESTION
What is the freezing point of gasoline?
:Being a mixture of various components, gasoline does not have a well-defined freezing point. Depending on the region where a blend is sold, the so-called crystallization point, or clouding point, should be lower than the expected minimum temperature in that specific region. Complete freezing occurs at a much lower temperature. Will return with some numbers soon.--Unconcerned 08:52, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Q&A's 

message: * Petrol#World_War_II_and_octane has received some anonymous additions correcting previous information which I can't check but appear not to be a patent nonsense. Anyway, the are written in the parenthetical polemics style
:(This is not true, as german aviation engines were of the direct fuel injection type and used emergency methanol-water and nitrous-oxide injection ...
:(this historical "issue" is based on a very common misapprehension about wartime fuel octane numbers. ...
:As someone has already pointed out ...
so it would need proper wikification/rewrite anyway. --Malyctenar 15:21, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  From PNA/Chemicals 

message: Could we please have this in SI units instead of 40 hogsheads to the rod units?
:As long as the article has that weird name, the weird units look pretty normal to me! The problem is, the people who use those units don't understand them, and the people who don't use those units don't understand them either.  So nobody can figure out how to convert them to SI units. Okay, maybe a couple of us could; I've got that hodsheads to the rod stuff down pat, 40.00 hogsheads to the rod is 1.897 m², round off that result according to how precise your "40" is.  (One problem, of course, is that people don't use the SI units for fuel consumption or fuel economy; a typical automobile fuel consumption is in the 50 to 100 µm² range, however, so 40 hogsheads to the rod takes an enormous amount of fuel.) Gene Nygaard 09:07, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: BTW, that means, of course, that Grandpa Simpson's vehicle would probably work fine if he had a two square meter (in cross-section) trough of fuel along the road from which he could suck up his fuel.  Gene Nygaard 09:20, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Units 

message: I still am confused as to why gasoline octane ratings refer to a percentage (which, in this case can't be over 100%) but fuels with octanes of over 100 exist.
:Its percentage compared to another fuel (2,3-dimethylpentane, if my chemistry serves me right). Same way as, say, height can be compared to a percentage of, say, 6 foot - 7 foot would be 116%. --Kiand 19:58, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: 2,2,4-trimethylpentane, according to this encyclopaedia. Ah well. --Kiand 20:00, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Octane in percent 

message: I learned in my economics course that leaded gasoline had faded out of use, because it had a negative impact on the growth of children (it supposedly caused mental disorders and what not). Could someone investigate this and incorporate it into the article? --Ted 05:53, August 17, 2005 (UTC)
:The article Tetra-ethyl_lead seems to cover this.  Do you think it should be made clearer that TEL damaged people and the environment in this article? --65.167.23.134 19:34, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It didn't "fade out of use", it was outright banned in most of the world. Across the EU no new car from 1993 onwards could use it, for instance. It was used a lot later in the EU than the US for some reason, possibly down to EU cars being designed for higher octane fuel - no cars here can touch petrol under 95RON, and yet the US "87 Octane" stuff converts to around 91 RON, for instance. --Kiand 21:35, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: That's just silly. I looked it up, the Honda Civic uses 91 RON in the UK, just like it does elsewhere in the world. --Bollinger 20:34, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Leaded gasoline causing damage to children's growth? 

message: apples have smells, so do woods...while we classify these things as solids, how do you explain the smell?
:Asking on a page about Petrol, no matter how annoying misnamed it is, isn't going to get you an answer to this. Asking on Smell might. --Kiand 18:15, 21 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Odors are the result of volatile chemical compounds that are released by a substance as vapor and that can be detected by sensor cells in the nose. Many solids as well as liquids give off these compounds; those that give off a lot are "smelly." Gasoline is highly volatile, meaning that it readily become vaporous, which is why it has a strong odor. In fact, it is these vapors that burn rather than the liquid; hence the need for a carburetor or fuel injection. --Tysto 17:52, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: if I remember right, the smell in gasoline is not natural--it's added so people can detect the presence of gasoline...important if you have a leak.  But the above reason would be why the odor spreads so easily. --Tenfour 14:24, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The smell in natural gas is added; I believe the smell in gasoline/petrol is it's "native" odor. Dculberson 14:58, 29 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is smell a gas? 

message: Without the record prices of the 70s included, the graph does not tell the whole story. Cshay 19:23, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree on that point, but I'm not sure they should be here at all.  This is an article on the substance gasoline/petrol, not specifically on its use in the United States retail market.  Why have a graph of U.S. retail prices, rather than say the much differently-shaped graph of German retail prices?  Some sort of international market wholesale prices indicating what gasoline itself costs at various times might be useful, but retail prices include all sorts of stuff such as local tax policy that should be dealt with in more specific articles on each country's domestic oil market. --Delirium 08:30, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inflation adjusted gas price graph should include the record prices of the 70s 

message: I think what "clear gasoline" is should be mentioned in the article. From my research, it appears to be gasoline that hasn't had dye added to it. Tax exempt gasoline can only be used for certain applications, so it is dyed to catch violaters. Does anyone have conflicting information? -- Kjkolb 09:01, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It has been redirected to a relevant article. -- Kjkolb 02:04, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clear gasoline 

message: These two things contradict:
Note that the main reason for the lower energy content (per litre) of LPG in comparison to gasoline is that it has a lower density. Energy content per kilogram is higher than for gasoline (higher hydrogen to carbon ratio). In simple terms, we burn mass, not volume!
Fuel type	    MJ/L	    MJ/kg	    BTU/imp gal	    BTU/US gal	    Research octane number (RON)
Gasoline 	29.0                        	45                           	150,000                            	125,000                           	91–98
LPG      	22.16                       	34.39                        	114,660                            	95,475                            	115
If the energey content per kilogram, for LPG, is higher than that for gasoline, why does the table say gasoline = 45MJ/kg, LPG = 34.39MJ/kg?
:Because the data was wrong. The problem as I see it is that several different articles have what should be the same data tables but with the information sourced from different places. Some of the data is seriously flawed. I'd really like to see some form of central database of physical constants such that all articles could access the same data set. This would probably need to be implemented in the wiki software. In the meantime, the table here has been upgraded to match that at Fuel economy in automobiles, including adding the reference from which the data has been derived. The reference provided octane numbers for gasoline but not the other fuels, so all other octane ratings remain effectively unreferenced. Needless to say, I'd need to see some pretty compelling evidence before accepting changes to any of the other data in this table. --Athol Mullen 22:40, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Contradictory data 

message: So, due to heat loss, friction, etc, real engines can only extract maybe 10%-40% of the total energy contained in gasoline.  So my question is: Are the numbers listed in the table the "ideal" values of energy density?  Or are they the average amount of energy a real engine could extract?JabberWok 20:56, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Energy Content...Ideal? 

message: The current text is misleading, RFG formerly had a federal requirement
to contain oxygen, but there is separate gasoline called 'oxegenated'.
I will clean that up, sometime soon.--CorvetteZ51 23:15, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Oxegenate Blending 

message: I'm interest in learning about Petrol Diesel Mixes, i've heard that its something like when they mix petrol and diesel badly, and it produces incorrect fuel is this true? and does it cost anything, i'm asuming it is a waste material and that it is free, i'm probably wrong,  but i'm hoping someone else can clean this up. as i hav been told my truck will run  on even the crudest of mixes
:When fuels are contaminated with each other, they are often sold to companies with boilers that can run on a wide variety of fuels. It is cheaper per gallon, but not free. Also, obtaining it would be difficult. It isn't something they generally offer at a gas station. You'd have to get a tanker truck to pick it up with or arrange for them to deliver to a large tank that you bought, as they won't bother dealing in small volume. -- Kjkolb 00:43, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Petrol Diesel Mixes