Combustion

Combustion of Alkanes What is combustion? Combustion is a chemical process where a fuel reacts with oxygen and releases heat. The fuel can either be a solid, liquid or gas and the oxidizer, the source of oxygen can also be a solid liquid or gas. A new chemical substance is created from the fuel and source of oxygen. These new chemical substances are referred to as exhaust. For combustion to occur, a fuel, oxygen and heat are required. In an alkane, the more carbon atoms that are present, the more heat that is produced because of combustion. Examples of Alkane Fuels: • Methane – main alkane present in natural gas (e.g. North Sea gas) • Propane – used in camping gas • Butane – Calor gas (a brand of bottled gas used in Britain and Ireland)…

graph and a set of sample calculations are included which will show how the values for the enthalpy of combustion of the fuel sources are deduced. Graph 1: Scatter plot showing the change in the temperature of 80.0mL of distilled water in the tin calorimeter during and after the combustion of the kerosene for the first conducted trial. The linear trendline was created for the last three data points, where the water was allowed to cool, which was then extrapolated backwards to account for the…

Combustion happens when a fuel reacts with oxygen. Depending on how much oxygen is available, fuels can combust completely or incompletely. Complete combustion happens when there is excess oxygen available to the fuel. Complete combustion of hydrocarbons produces water (H2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2). Incomplete combustion happens when there is limited oxygen. The incomplete combustion of hydrocarbons produces water (H2O), small amounts of Carbon Dioxide (CO2), Carbon Monoxide (CO) and…

A combustion reaction (also known as burning) is an exothermic reaction in which something reacts with oxygen. Combustion reactions are known to be one of the most common types of reactions, they don’t need a lot to happen, there only needs to be an excess amount of oxygen, and with the excess amount, the combustion is called a complete combustion reaction. But with a little amount, the reaction is called an incomplete combustion reaction. The products in a complete combustion reaction are water…

The change in enthalpy for the combustion of magnesium metal Abstract ======== Hess’s law of heat summation states that the value of DH for a reaction is the same whether it occurs directly or as a series of…

From the humble steam engine to the more complex and sophisticated internal combustion of gasoline, engines have become a necessity to daily lives, more specifically automobiles. Since the 19th century, automobiles were able to revolutionize the world in a variety of ways. Because of the unreasonable price and low popularity, automobiles were not as prominent as they are today (Purdy 1). The history of the automobile depicts the effort used in the past centuries in order to delineate the…

The NOx Problem 1. History of Diesel The diesel engine is a Compression Ignition (CI) Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) that was invented by Rudolf Diesel, a German engineer in 1892. Unlike a Sparked Ignition (SI) engine, Diesel designed the engine to run on vegetable oil, more specifically peanut oil. 2. CI vs SI, the difference As its name suggests, the CI engine’s ignition of the air-fuel mixture is caused by the mechanism compression rather than a spark from a spark plug of SI engine. This…

Combustion Engine Versus Eco-Friendly Engine As the population becomes dependent on the environment, environmentally friendly vehicles have appeared as an alternative to gas-powered vehicles. Many methods exist to power SUV’s, trucks, and cars. Vehicles are powered by the combustion of both gasoline and diesel fuel. The transportation industry is drastically trying to improve its methods for reducing its greenhouse gas emissions and pollutants to the environment. Electric cars notably are…

Throughout this lab the goal was to figure out the enthalpy of combustion of magnesium. Enthalpy (H) is the energy stored in a substance during its formation. The amount of energy that may be absorbed or released when a chemical reaction takes place is known as the change in enthalpy (ΔH). If a reaction absorbs heat, then it will be positive number and will be called an endothermic reaction. If a reaction releases heat, then it will have a negative number and will be called an exothermic…

Heat of Combustion of Magnesium Hypothesis: Hess’s law states that “the enthalpy change for the conversion of reactants to products is the same whether the conversion occurs in one step or several steps” (DiGiuseppe et al,2012,p.314 ). A series of two experiments will perform in this lab in order to find ΔH1 and ΔH2 . In addition, ΔH3 will be obtained by reference. It is predicted that the combustion of magnesium will have a negative enthalpy, since combustion is an exothermic reaction. Also…