Old 07-18-14 | 06:56 AM
  #34  
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cyccommute
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Originally Posted by dscheidt
Going to admit you're dead wrong on the flash point of white gas, and its safety as solvent?

Also: white gas and good quality mineral spirits are products that sold on their consistency. Refinery feed stock changes, the process changes to keep the end product within the specification.
Yes, I was wrong on the flash point of white gas but its flash point is much higher than that of gasoline and the energy within the liquid is much lower than gasoline. White gas (aka naphtha) also has a lower concentration of aromatics...benzene/xylene/toluene...which gives gasoline its energy and vastly increase the toxicity of the material. I will stand by my statement that naphtha is a far safer solvent than gasoline. It's not as safe as mineral spirits but it's certainly safer to use than gasoline.

Originally Posted by AnkleWork
Without stating a probability distribution those ranges are meaningless. Distilled hydrocarbon products do not have hard limits on molecular weights; rather, confidence intervals define the ranges.
This is exactly what the point I was making above. The different solvents and fuels are ranges of molecular weights that come from the distillation of a material that has varying amounts of each cut. Refineries produce a distillation cut based on a temperature range but they have no control over the concentration of individual molecules in the cut. Saying that kerosene is "centered on C10" molecules is meaningless.

These solvents aren't made by blending alkanes that have 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, etc carbons in certain proportions. They are made by taking a temperature range from crude oil where alkanes with those carbon chains boil off. Kerosene boils in the range of 150C to 275C. The material probably doesn't have much C5 in the mix since it would have boiled off first. It likely doesn't have much C20 hydrocarbon in it either because the boiling point is too low to collect that kind of hydrocarbon.
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