Results from experiment 1
Remember, the idea in my first experiment was to examine which fuel burns longer at a given volume?
I also made an interesting side observation while conducting my experiement.
Observations
While burning, both gasoline and diesel had yellow fires that gave off a rancid smoke, however ethanol had a semi-transparent blue flame that gave off no visible smoke or detectable smell. After all the tests were done the glass burning diesel was pure obsidian, the one burning gasoline was brownish-black and the one burning ethanol was still clear, ( See photos below).
 |
 |
Photo: Containers before burning fuels. |
Photo: Containers after burning fuels. |
Results
Comparative burning time of three fuels is presented in Figure 1. As depicted by Figure 1, the three fuel types varied significantly in their burn durations. After testing each fuel fifteen times and calculating the mean and total, I found out that diesel had the longest burn. Raw data amd calculated mean values for each fuel are presented in Appendix 1 (Table 2). Diesel had mean burn duration of 85.3127 seconds followed by ethanol with mean burn duration of 53.528 seconds and Gasoline (28.8647 seconds) (Appendix 1, Table 2).
My research has proved my hypothesis semi-correct. I hypothesized that diesel would burn the longest and it did. Gasoline brunt the shortest, which I had not expected to do, instead ethanol burned longer than gasoline.
Figure 1. Comparative burn duration of Diesel, Ethanol and Gasoline. Error bars represent standard deviation of measurements.