Common Flames
In daily life, the vast majority of flames one encounters are those of organic compounds including wood, wax, fat, common plastics, propane, and gasoline. The constant-pressure adiabatic flame temperature of such substances in air is in a relatively narrow range around 1950 °C. This is because, in terms of stoichiometry, the combustion of an organic compound with n carbons involves breaking roughly 2n C–H bonds, n C–C bonds, and 1.5n O2 bonds to form roughly n CO2 molecules and n H2O molecules.
Because most combustion processes that happen naturally occur in the open air, there is nothing that confines the gas to a particular volume like the cylinder in an engine. As a result, these substances will burn at a constant pressure allowing the gas to expand during the process.
Read more about this topic: Adiabatic Flame Temperature
Famous quotes containing the words common and/or flames:
“In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life.”
—Joseph De Maistre (1753–1821)
“And songs climb out of the flames of the near campfires,
Pale, pastel things exquisite in their frailness
With a note or two to indicate it isn’t lost,
On them at least. The songs decorate our notion of the world
And mark its limits, like a frieze of soap-bubbles.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)