Will frozen fuel (gasoline, diesel, alcohol, etc.) catch fire if you put lighten match next to it?
Leaving aside the point that petroleum does not freeze, no, not oil products. Gasoline, diesel and the like need to be vaporized before they will effectively burn.
(Solid oils are basically waxes, and will melt and burn using a device called a “candle.”)
It will if you get it cold enough.
Yes - there’s essentially little functional difference between frozen petroleum and paraffin wax - they just have different freezing/melting points.
(I mean, they’re different chemicals, with different values of energy available from combustion, but they behave more or less the same)
The two numbers you need to compare are the “flash point” (the temperature at which enough vapor can build up to support combustion) and the freezing point. For some hydrocarbons, the flash point is actually pretty high, e.g. diesel is 52 C. Hold a match next to a cup full of (liquid) room-temperature diesel and it will not catch fire.
Gasoline is a lot more volatile, with a flash point of -50 C, and will definitely catch fire in such a scenario. I can’t find a good number for the freezing point of gasoline, because it’s a complicated mixture of chemicals with different freezing points. Some random WAGs on the internet mention -40 to -50 C as the range where gasoline freezes. If that’s correct, a block of frozen gasoline (or a slush, as it may be) at -45 will catch fire if you set a match to it.
Notice that you can’t easily set a block of wax on fire without the wick. A match will raise the temperature of the wax-filled wick above the flash point of wax, which starts a flame that can continually melt more wax, resulting in a nice steady burn rate.
Aren’t firelighters essentially just high-melting point petroleum fuel? I know some of them are kerosene soaked into a base material, but some are essentially solid fuel tablets, like hexamine.
INo the frozen stuff be below flash point… I find the freezing point is more like -100 F
See Gasoline FAQ - Part 3 of 4
… Its only turned solid well below flash point, so solid gasoline won’t burn. If its ALL solid, its very very cold …
I think Sterno gel fuel burns without need for a wick too. Presumably because the heat from the fire vaporizes enough of the solid fuel to keep the fire going. The same might happen for a frozen block of gasoline.
So I wonder what a gasoline candle might look like? Too bad some of those internet idiots who do crazy stunts haven’t tried this one yet.
Have you seen an oil lamp? There you go. And if you haven’t, well, there’s a reason for that; tilt it sideways or break it, and your lamp becomes a conflagration. The paraffin in candles, on the other hand, evaporates at a very slow rate and provides much better control. But you can’t “turn it up” or get a lot of light from it.
Stranger