Geek woman news story of possible interest...

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 07:08:57PM -0400, Scott Elcomb wrote:
> Can you provide sources for this claim?  It's hard to imagine a fuel
> source for combustion-based engines as being "resistant to
> explosion."[2][3]  Also, I'm curious how much more this feature would
> cost - and how many airlines can afford to pay for it?

Try making Diesel fuel explode.  Good luck on that.  In fact try setting
it on fire.  Even that takes work (you need to heat it up first).  Jet
fuel and Diesel fuel are very similar (in fact they can prety much be
interchanged without issue, which is why there are new small planes with
Diesel engines which run on jet fuel since that is what airports sell,
and similarly there are stunt vehicles with jet engines which run on
diesel fuel since it lubricates the engine better and reduces
maintainance a bit).  Gasoline on the other hand is highly volatile, and
the resulting vapours are very explosive.  Now once you get a fire
going, jet fuel will be nicely heated and burn really well (it has
slightly more energy per volume than gasoline) and will cause a nice
mess, but you do have to make it catch fire first.

Gasoline burns in an engine (usually) because it is vaporized and mixed
with warm air and then a spark sets it off (fuel + oxygen + source of
ignition = fire).  Diesel burns in an engine because it is vaporized
into very hot air which causes it to ignite and burn.  Now you can do
the same to gasoline, but being as volatile as it is makes it hard to
control (although there are engines coming out that do exactly that,
although they switch to using spark plugs and lower temperature (by
using lower compression) at the high and very low engine speeds where
ignition by heat of compression isn't controlable for such a volatile
fuel.

--
Len Sorensen
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