Experiment 1
Comparison of burn duration (Fuel grade) of ethanol (E95), gasoline and diesel.
Purpose
I wanted to know if ethanol really was a miracle fuel of the future, so I decided to see if ethanol had a longer burn (at a given volume) than today’s conventional fuels. I wanted to test, out of three fuels: gasoline, ethanol, and diesel, which one has the longest burn.
Hypothesis
I hypothesized that diesel would burn the longest because it has the highest octane out of the fuels I have tested, which means it has a longer burn. I thought gasoline would burn second longest out of all the fuels because it’s used the most and most engines are designed for gasoline. I thought ethanol would burn for the least.
To test my hypothesis, I designed a burning experiment, where I burnt an equal amount of each fuel, then recorded the times on a table. I repeated each experiment until I had a total of 15 trials per fuel.
Materials used
1m x 1m piece of cheese cloth
1 litre of gasoline, Ethanol 95%, and diesel
3 glass cups of equal volume
Three glass jars
1 set of measuring spoons
1 stopwatch
1 candle and 1 book of matches
Variables
Independent variable: type of fuel
Dependent variable: cleanliness and duration of burn
Constants: cups, wicks, heat of fire, environment
Procedure
- Cut cheese cloth into 4.5 x 1.5cm pieces approx.
- Pour the fuels to be tested into three different jars, labelled appropriately.
- Lit a candle with matches.
- Spoon out 1.25ml of Diesel, Gasoline or Ethanol using measuring spoon.
- Soak in a 4.5x1.5cm cheese cloth on the measuring spoon with the fuel in it.
- Lit the soaked cheesecloth on fire, then drop into the appropriately labelled glass cup.
- Record and tabulate burn duration after each trial.
- Repeat steps 4, 5, 6, and 7 were five times each for each fuel.
- Repeat each experiment three times for a total of 15 repetitions for each fuel type.