Fuel
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All aviation fuel is produced to stringent quality standards to avoid fuel-related engine failures. Aviation standards are much more strict than those for road vehicle fuel because an aircraft engine must meet a strictly defined level of performance under known conditions. These high standards mean that aviation fuel costs much more than fuel used for road vehicles.
Aircraft reciprocating (piston) engines are typically designed to run on aviation gasoline. Avgas has a higher octane rating as compared to automotive gasoline, allowing the use of higher compression ratios, increasing power output and efficiency at higher altitudes. Currently the most common Avgas is 100LL, which refers to the octane rating (100 octane) and the lead content (LL = low lead).
Avgas is blended with tetra-ethyl lead (TEL) to achieve these high octane ratings, a practice no longer permitted with road vehicle gasoline. The shrinking supply of TEL, and the possibility of environmental legislation banning its use, has made a search for replacement fuels for general aviation aircraft a priority for pilot's organizations.
Turbine engines and aircraft Diesel engines burn various grades of jet fuel. Jet fuel is a relatively heavy and less volatile petroleum derivative based on kerosene, but certified to strict aviation standards, with additional additives.
Read more about this topic: Aircraft Engine
Famous quotes containing the word fuel:
“I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied when I was plowing, they warmed me twice,—once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat. As for the axe,... if it was dull, it was at least hung true.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is now many years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts: the New Englander and the New Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill; in most parts of the world, the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do without them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Beware the/easy griefs, that fool and fuel nothing./It is too easy to cry “AFRIKA!”/and shock thy street,/and purse thy mouth,/and go home to thy “Gunsmoke,” to/thy “Gilligan’s Island” and the NFL.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)