On Sun, 04 Sep 2005 22:12:40 +0100, dennis@home
wrote:


It was (still is?) common practice to put upto 30% petrol in diesel cars
to
stop waxing in very cold weather.
Isn't this what winter diesel is anyway?

It was normally paraffin used for wax-proofing diesel and the Excisemen
could be very cross with you for this. Another genius method was to light
a fire under the fuel tank of a truck. Winter diesel is normally a
lower-boiling cut of the distillate which does not particularly carry the
alkanes present in petrol, more paraffin sized ones. In fact chromatograms
of distillate fuels show a characteristic bell-curve shape across the
peaks as in

http://www.sge.com/pdfs_local/applic...m/PET%2006.pdf

the Winter diesel I worked with carried a double peak, suggesting strongly
that it was a blend of two distillates, one being in the standard diesel
range of carbon numbers, and the other being slightly on the heavy side of
paraffin.

John Schmitt

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