What Do You Know About Gasoline?

Gasoline is considered a perfect fuel. It is a liquid. It is light. It changes easily into vapour. It is easily ignited.

Gasoline is a mixture of hydrocarbons, which means it is a compound make up of carbon and hydrogen. The name is derived from “gas”. It is used because the liquid gasoline as so easily changed into a gas in the cylinder. Once gasoline is ignited, it burns completely and leaves little waste. In burning, it gives more heat than the same amount of any other liquid fuel.

There are several sources of gasoline. The most important is natural crude oil, or petroleum. It is found in deposits under the ground. Gasoline is separated from petroleum by a process called “distillation”. The liquid oil is placed in large containers called “stills” and heated to about 205 degrees centigrade. This is the temperature at which gasoline changes into vapour, about one quarter of the petroleum containing the hydrocarbons that boil lowest.

The vapour is lead through cooled pipes. The pipes are cooled from outside in order to liquify it. The distillation is repeated and gasoline is purified or refined.

The value of a gasoline depends on its performance, the capacity of a litre to drive a car or fly a plane in number of kilometres at high speed. With simple refined gasoline, knocking sounds are heard in the motor when gasoline knocks, its performance is poor, because of poor ignition. So, certain “anti-knock” ingredients are added which improve its performance. We call this “high-octane” gasoline. Today better and still better grades of high-octane gasoline are being produced to give our cars better performance.