Results from Experiment 2
Remember, the idea in my second experiment was to examine the energy content (Btu) of ethanol, gasoline and diesel.
Observations
As mentioned in the first experiment, the container where I burnt the ethanol was clean, where as the gasoline and diesel containers were blackened. An additional observation in this experiment was that diesel left an oily residue in the bottom of the container. For my burn duration experiments, I used only 1.25ml of each fuel. This made me think that diesel might give off more pollution at higher amounts, compared to other fuels. because in this experiment, I used 5ml of each fuel.
Results
My experiment measuring the energy content, in terms of Btu, of each fuel proved my hypothesis fully correct. Ethanol had the highest Btu (37.1) while gasoline and diesel had comparable Btu values (22.4 and 24.7 respectively) (Appendix 1, Table 3). Comparative mean Btu values of diesel, ethanol, and gasoline are presented in the Figure below (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Comparative Btu values of diesel, ethanol, and gasoline. Error bars represent standard deviation of individual measurements from their mean.