How to convert 1 gallon of gasoline into 160 gallons of highly combustible fuel., page 1

A gallon of gasoline has a known amount of potential energy.

When you burn gasoline under ideal conditions, with plenty of oxygen, you get carbon dioxide (from the carbon atoms in gasoline), water (from the hydrogen atoms) and lots of heat. A gallon of gasoline contains about 132x106 joules of energy, which is equivalent to 125,000 BTU or 36,650 watt-hours:

* If you took a 1,500-watt space heater and left it on full blast for a full 24-hour day, that's about how much heat is in a gallon of gas.

* If it were possible for human beings to digest gasoline, a gallon would contain about 31,000 food calories -- the energy in a gallon of gasoline is equivalent to the energy in about 110 McDonalds hamburgers!

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Here is some interesting data:

We will assume our car weighs 1000 kilograms (2200 pounds).
What Can You Do With a Gallon of Gas?

To raise an object, the energy needed is mgh, where h is the mass of the object, g is the acceleration of gravity (9.8 meters per second squared) and h is the height.

To raise a car weighing 1000 kilograms a distance of 100 meters would require about a million joules. You could raise a car 12.5 kilometers with the energy in a gallon of gas, or drive up 125 100-meter hills. Driving up Pike's Peak (about a 3000-meter climb) should consume about a quart of gas.

But these figures assume you can get all the energy out of a gallon of gas and apply it with perfect efficiency to raising the car. Driving miles of winding road up Pike's Peak is a far cry from simply lifting the car vertically.

It takes energy to accelerate. The energy of a moving object, called kinetic energy, is given by K=1/2mv2, where m is the mass of the object and v is the speed. If a car weighs 1000 kg and accelerates to 60 mph (27 m/sec), the energy required is 365,000 joules. About 350 such accelerations would consume a gallon of gas, assuming you could apply all that energy solely to accelerating the car, which you can't.

Just for fun, in outer space, if you could apply all the energy in a gallon of gas to moving a car with perfect efficiency, you could get 125 million joules = 1/2mv2, and for a 1000-kilogram car you'd have v2 = 250,000 and v = 500 meters per second or 1120 miles per hour.

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All in all, with more efficient motors, more conversion of energy, less resistance and friction, 400 mpg cars are entirely possible. We can get there, we just need to upgrade our thinking, and our technology.

If we could get all the energy out of a gallon of gasoline and apply it to overcoming the rolling resistance of a car, we could get about 400 miles per gallon. But the internal engine resistance multiplies the force required by roughly five, meaning the best we could hope for is about 80 miles a gallon. The engineering constraints of getting useful work out of expanding hot gases cuts that figure by 50 per cent to about 40 miles per gallon. So better fuels and fuel injection could improve mileage, but not stupendously.

We have to change our engine structures and our methods of transforming that energy into motion. Gasoline has plenty of power, we are just wasting 90% of it!!