If gasoline and petrol are the same, where does LPG (Liquid Petroleum Gas) come into It and how can it be a liquid and a gas?
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Gasoline and petrol is the same thing, referred to in different names. The origin of gasoline/petrol is the petroleum oil also known as the crude oil. This fossil fuel consists of a mixture of several hydrocarbons and other impurities in gaseous, liquid, and solid states. Gasoline is one of the products isolated from the crude oil by fractional distillation and is widely consumed in the industrial world.
Gasoline and Petrol are the same, just different terms in North America vs Europe.
Gasoline isn’t a gas, it’s a liquid. The term GASOLINE is thought to have been influenced by the trademark “Cazeline” or “Gazeline”, named after the surname of British publisher, coffee merchant, and social campaigner John Cassell.
sources for this “John Cassel”?
In the early days of motoring there were some confusion about what the fuel was called. It was sold under various different names including gasoline, petrol and benzine. These then became common names. The “gas” in gasoline does not come from gas but started out as the trademark Cazeline from John Cassell. Counterfit Cazeline was sold under the trademark Gazeline and then in North America was simplified to Gasoline.
Petrol is short for Petrolium which literally means “rock oil”. This shorter term was first used for refined petrolium used as solvants but this was the right composition to use in combustion engines. The term benzine comes from the chemical benzene which is also a petrochemical solvant. There are small amounts of benzene in the fuel as a byproduct of the refining process which might have inspired the term, or it might have been confused with each other as petrol and benzene would be used interchangably as solvants.
Liquid Petrolem Gas is a mixture of propane and butane gases. They can be liquified under pressure to increase the density, and evaporate to a gaseous state once the container is opened.
LPG means ***Liquefied*** *Petroleum Gas*. So not ‘liquid’, but ‘liquefied’. It is a liquid, but the point is that it started out as a gas. Or really a mixture of gases, usually propane, butane and propylene. We (at least in daily speech) refer to these substances as gases, not because they can only ever be a gas, but because that’s how we usually encounter them, at typical temperatures (not much warmer or colder than room temp) and typical pressures (around 1 atmosphere). But you can make them liquid by cooling them or putting them under pressure (in practice usually the latter). Why would you want to do that? Well, because in liquid form, they’re much denser. Which means that you can actually put a decent amount of this fuel in a reasonably-sized (pressurized) tank inside your car, rather than having to carry it around in a gigantic balloon or something.
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