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About what concentration of gasoline fumes would need to be in the air to ignite?
So this one time, I'm sitting in the passenger seat of a van at a gas station, and I'm pretty bored. With the quick impulse of an attention deficient child, I grabbed for a cigarette lighter and was about to flick it on.
Luckily, I was slapped in the face by some obvious logic: "DUH, I'm at a gas station."
So I put down the lighter, and realized how near I was to possibly blowing myself up.
Just out of curiosity, would anyone happen to know approximately how concentrated the air would need to be with fumes for it to be able to ignite and blow up the whole gas station?
2 Answers
- Anonymous1 decade agoFavorite Answer
I heard about 5% of the fuel/air mix should be fuel. Less and it won't catch, more and the mix is too "rich" to burn.
- 1 decade ago
Well a naturally aspirated internal combustion engine (i.e a car engine that doesn't have a turbo or blower) needs an optimal mixture of 14.7:1 of oxygen to gasoline. So there needs to be 14.7 times as much oxygen as gasoline. This also happens to be the air pressure at sea level. Hope this helps.
P.S. I wouldn't try to experiment. Gasoline is volatile.
