Credit: Prithwish Biswas et al.
Chemical engineers at the University of California Riverside have designed a fuel that only ignites with the application of an electric current. The new fuel is considered a “safe” liquid fuel that will be less likely to lead to accidental fires.
When fuel combusts, the volatile molecules released from the fuel are what burn when they come into contact with a flame source and oxygen. Removing the oxygen from the equation will extinguish the fire, however, this is difficult to achieve in almost all scenarios.
“If you throw a match into a pool of gasoline on the ground, it’s the vapor of the gas that’s burning. You can smell that vapor and you instantly know it’s volatile,” said Prithwish Biswas, UCR chemical engineering doctoral student. “If you can control the vapor, you can control whether the fuel burns.”
The paper, published in The Journal of the American Chemical Society, describes the newly created and patented fuel created by the researchers. The base of the new fuel produced is an organic ionic liquid with a low vapor pressure. During testing, the fuel would not ignite from an open flame source alone. It was not until an electric current was used along with the open flame that the fuel ignited.
“Once we shut off the current, the flame was gone, and we were able to repeat that process over and over again — applying voltage, seeing smoke, lighting the smoke so it burned, then turning it off,” said Yujie Wang, UCR chemical engineering doctoral student. “We were excited to find a system we could start and stop very quickly.”
The team also discovered that adding more voltage resulted in a larger flame with increased energy output. This could have applications to be used as a throttling system as the addition or reduction in current can control the energy output of the flame. “You can measure the combustion in this way, and cutting the voltage works like a dead man switch — a safety feature that automatically shuts down a machine if the operator becomes incapacitated,” said Michael Zachariah, professor of chemical engineering at UCR.
Additional research is required to optimize the new fuel for widespread applications. Production costs are a concern noted by the researchers but they feel as though the increased safety may outweigh the increase in costs. “How competitive would it be? I don’t know. But if safety is important, that’s a major aspect of this. You make something safe, then there is a benefit that goes beyond the bottom line,” Zachariah said.