Re: Tips To Get Better Gas Mileage/Performance!

He's probably buying up cans of acetone at home depot, rebottled at 18x normal price, and has gone into the automotive snake bit biz.. LOL... MK

I still won't risk putting unapproved solvents in my tank - the potential costs are far too high. But mostly I am concerned that nobody has seen fit to market acetone as a gasoline additive (one bottle treats a whole tank for one thin dollar!) There is enormous money to be made but nobody seems to want to go out on that limb. I wonder why.

Mike

Michael Pardee wrote:

Probably because these two paragraphs, upon which the justification to use acetone rely on, were written by someone who has little understanding of chemistry.

Water will reach 300 °F before vaporization under pressure. However, is the gasoline under pressure once it's been released by the fuel injector? No. In addition, the surface tension of gasoline is remarkably low compared to water. Just try floating a sewing pin on gasoline. Now try it again with a second clean pin on water. Gasoline is mostly a non-polar fluid, thus it has extraordinarily few hydrogen bonds in it compared to water which are responsible for creating water's surface tension. Moreover, water will vaporize quite nicely even at room temperature. Just put a mL of water in an open dish on a sensitive balance, one measuring in grams to at least 4 or

5 decimal places. The balance will never equilibrate due to the continuous loss of water to the vapor phase. For each mg lost, a µL of water has been lost to the vapor state right before our eyes. Now for comparison, put the water in a small enclosed container. The container will "lose" weight for a short period of time but then quickly stop as the air in the container becomes saturated and the number of water molecules leaving the bulk water for the vapor phase reaches equilibrium with the number of water molecules in the vapor phase returning to the bulk liquid water. For fun, repeat the experiment with gasoline. What you'll find it that the gasoline "loses" weight more quickly. That's due to it's higher vapor pressure. A higher vapor pressure means that it's easier for gasoline molecules to enter the vapor phase. Why? There's far fewer polar bonds thus there's much less hydrogen bonding holding the gasoline molecules in the liquid phase. The hydrocarbon molecules in gasoline are held in the liquid phase primarily by london forces due to the instantaneous polarizability of the electron clouds. London forces are considerably weaker than the hydrogen bonds found in polar molecules. Thus, we've just demonstrated that gasoline will vaporize much more easily than water and is indeed quite dissimilar with respect to surface tension contrary to the claims made in the article. Now, if someone with a sensitive balance has some time on their hands, then it would be fun to test the article's hypothesis that a small amount of acetone will noticeably raise the vapor pressure of gasoline. Any volunteers?

Natural frequency? Inherent molecular vibration? Every molecular bond will have stretching and bending frequencies which are unique to a particular type of bond, including the molecular bonds found in both gasoline as well as acetone. Lower the temperature and these will decrease. At 0 °K they're all gone! Maybe they would suggest preheating the gasoline? That would certainly increase it's "inherent molecular vibration". I'm curious how they determined that the bonds are "sluggish". Wishful thinking perhaps?

The author isn't very good at math either! For example, 1 part in 3000 is

0.033% while 1 part in 5000 is 0.02%. Moreover, 3 oz. per 10 gallons is 0.23%.

Overall, the article is entertaining to read but probably not useful for much else.

Eric