Re: Vapor lock

Posted by Owen_Dyneto On 2009/7/9 8:54:25

Gasoline is a mixture and thus doesn't have a single boiling point; it's a mixture of hundreds perhaps even more individual hydrocarbon molecules, each with it's own individual boiling point. Hence the fact that it has a boiling point "range", not a single number. When you see gasoline boiling, you are seeing the lowest boiling component boiling.

If you were to put gasoline in a distillation column and begin to heat, you'd see the boiling point rise gradually as the lower-boiling fractions are distilled off, leaving the higher-boiling compounds behind. Crude gasoline of many years back before the advent of efficient "cracking" (which sort of broke the larger, higher boiling molecules into smaller, lower boiling ones) no doubt had a much broader boiling point range than today's products. Actual data would be interesting.

Overly simplified description.