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'Describes (in partly animated form: "talking gasoline drops," etc!) the refining of gasoline, its chemical breakdown, etc; excellent shots of gasoline stations (with the "
Royal Crown" glass globes atop the gas pumps; striking images), and oil refineries.
Good shots fo stop light changing from red to green; driver's
POV on
Western highway; CU speedometer accelerating to 50
MPH; CU gas jet stovetop; beautiful
Chrysler "Town and Country" ("
Woody") on rural highway. '
A revised version of this film from the
Bureau of Mines was released in the mid-1950s as "
The Story of
Gasoline"; here with better sound but no color: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVZjg4c93mA
Public domain film from the
National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and equalization).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline
Gasoline is a toxic, translucent, petroleum-derived liquid that is primarily used as a fuel in internal combustion engines. It consists mostly of organic compounds obtained by the fractional distillation of petroleum, enhanced with a variety of additives. Some gasolines also contain ethanol as an alternative fuel. In
North America, the term "gasoline" is often shortened in colloquial usage to "gas", whereas most current or former
Commonwealth nations use the term "petrol". Under normal ambient conditions its material state is liquid, unlike liquefied petroleum gas or "natural gas".
Volatility
Gasoline is more volatile than diesel oil, Jet-A, or kerosene, not only because of the base constituents, but also because of additives. Volatility is often controlled by blending with butane, which boils at -0.5 °C. The volatility of gasoline is determined by the
Reid vapor pressure (
RVP) test
...
...in some cases, gasoline can also combust abnormally by detonation, which wastes energy and can damage the engine. This phenomenon is often referred to as engine knocking. One way to reduce detonation is to increase the gasoline's resistance to autoignition, which is expressed by its octane rating.
Octane rating is measured relative to a mixture of
2,2,4-trimethylpentane (an isomer of octane) and n-heptane. There are different conventions for expressing octane ratings, so a fuel may have several different octane ratings based on the measure used.
Research octane number (
RON) for commercially-available gasoline varies by country... In the UK, ordinary regular unleaded petrol is 91 RON... premium unleaded petrol is always 95 RON, and super unleaded is usually 97-98 RON. However, both
Shell and BP produce fuel at 102 RON for cars with high-performance engines... In the US, octane ratings in unleaded fuels can vary between 86 and 87
AKI (91-92 RON) for regular, through 89-90 AKI (94-95 RON) for mid-grade, up to 90-94 AKI (95-99 RON) for premium.
The octane rating became important as the military sought higher output for aircraft engines in the late
1930s and the
1940s. A higher octane rating allows a higher compression ratio, and thus higher temperatures and pressures, which translate to higher power output...
Tetraethyl lead
Gasoline, when used in high-compression internal combustion engines, has a tendency to autoignite (detonate) causing damaging "engine knocking" (also called "pinging" or "pinking") noise.
Early research into this effect was led by
A.H. Gibson and
Harry Ricardo in
England and
Thomas Midgley and
Thomas Boyd in the
United States.
The discovery that lead additives modified this behavior led to the widespread adoption of their use in the
1920s, and therefore more powerful, higher compression engines. The most popular additive was tetra-ethyl lead. With the discovery of the extent of environmental and health damage caused by the lead, however, and the incompatibility of lead with catalytic converters found on virtually all newly sold US automobiles since
1975, this practice began to wane (encouraged by many governments introducing differential tax rates) in the
1980s.
In the US, where lead had been blended with gasoline (primarily to boost octane levels) since the early 1920s, standards to phase out leaded gasoline were first implemented in
1973 - due in great part to studies conducted by
Philip J. Landrigan. In
1995, leaded fuel accounted for only 0.6% of total gasoline sales and less than
2000 short tons (
1814 t) of lead per year. From 1
January 1996, the
Clean Air Act banned the sale of leaded fuel for use in on-road vehicles.
Possession and use of leaded gasoline in a regular on-road vehicle now carries a maximum $10,
000 fine in the US. However, fuel containing lead may continue to be sold for off-road uses, including aircraft, racing cars, farm equipment, and marine engines.
- published: 21 Jan 2015
- views: 2023