Cigarette Gasoline Lighter

December 27, 2008 admin

Cigarette Gasoline Lighter
About what concentration of gasoline fumes would need to be in the air to ignite?

So this one time, I'm sitting in the passenger seat of a van at a gas station, and I'm pretty bored. With the quick impulse of an attention deficient child, I grabbed for a cigarette lighter and was about to flick it on.

Luckily, I was slapped in the face by some obvious logic: "DUH, I'm at a gas station."
So I put down the lighter, and realized how near I was to possibly blowing myself up.

Just out of curiosity, would anyone happen to know approximately how concentrated the air would need to be with fumes for it to be able to ignite and blow up the whole gas station?

I heard about 5% of the fuel/air mix should be fuel. Less and it won't catch, more and the mix is too "rich" to burn.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-fuel_ratio