>It's weird. Try to repair a tank with high heat or flame, BANG! But old Pappy
>pulled a leaking gas tank out of a truck, took it out a 100 yards or so, set
>it
>on the ground, placed some newspaper in the filler neck, lit it and ran.
>Nothing. No bang, no mushroom, just nothing... What a disappointment.
Yes, it was mentioned that no one has brought chemistry or physics into
this. I care so little about this thread after all the replies I got, which
is more than what the list got, and all of which I replied to in private,
that I am not going to bother to look up actual numbers, but as to
chemistry and physics....
There seems to be this notion that if there is gasoline in a tank and the
tank is exposed to some high temperature type of event (spark, heat, flame,
etc) that it will without question blow up. This is not true at all. The
ignition temperature of gas vapor at atmospheric pressue is something like
1000 deg F. That blows the argument about using a soldering iron out the
window, they are half of that. The second issue is fuel to air ratio.
There is a narrow region of F/A ratio where the air and gas vapor mixture
will ignite (rapid ignition a.k.a explosion). If the ratio is above that,
meaning to rich, or below that, meaning to lean, it will not ignite or blow
up. I do not know off hand the ratio range for gasoline at STP but I have
seen the numbers for natural gas for instance and the range is pretty small.
Just a side note, back in the days of gas lighting, there was a gas used in
some areas called gasoline gas. They saturated an air stream with gasoline
vapor and piped it out to the masses. Sounds dangerious? The fact is that
the mixture was so rich that it would not burn in the pipe, only when
exiting the pipe and mixing with more air (or oxygen actually). If anyone
really cares they can look up some of the characteristics for gasoline
themselves.
This is my last post on this topic. For those of you that think I and
aussierob and a few other should make the Darwin award list, your entitled
to your opinion. I stand by everything I have said to everyone public and
private. Cry wolf to many times and no one is going to listen anymore!
je
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 05 2001 - 00:40:36 PDT