How is gasoline different from diesel, and why does it damage the car if you put the wrong kind in the tank?
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Lots of youtubers say you can use diesel to clean old gasoline engines while they are rebuilding.
Is that correct?
Diesels run at extremely high fuel pressure and use the fuel as a lubricant. Gasoline does not have the same lubricating properties and the pumps and injectors suffer severe damage from lack of lubrication. As far as gasoline, diesel won’t burn in a gas engine for the reasons others have covered well. The system needs to be taken apart and cleaned witch leads to a high repair bill. Now with direct injected gasoline engine we may very well start seeing actual damage because they run at relatively high pressures and diesel fuel is more viscous than gasoline
Diesel combusts by compression but it also acts as a lubricant through the diesel system. It is injected into the cylinder under immense pressure.
Petrol requires a source of ignition (spark plug) and also compression, however the compression is considerably lower than a Diesel.
Diesel is oil based, hence its use as a lubrication before it is burned. The pressures required are achieved by a mechanical pump. Petrol is a solvent, running this through said pump can cause premature wear and also damage. (Think of running your engine with no oil in it) moving metal parts against one another require lubrication and cooling!
Diesel is less refined than petrol (gasoline), so in theory it’s easier to produce – and you can create a diesel equivalent from ordinary cooking oil with a little work, but consumer grade engines are often too specialised to be able to use it without issues. Military vehicles on the other hand, are build to withstand a variety…
From memory (35 years ago !) the way crude oil is processed is essentially a tall tube is filled with oil. The tube is heated at the bottom, and the oil splits into layers over the height of the tube, each layer having it’s own specific properties like tarmac, diesel, gasoline, kerosene, with the lighter grades being higher up the tube.
gasoline and diesel are both made up of hydrocarbon chains (carbon + hydrogen atoms connected together). diesel has more carbon atoms in a chain than gasoline.
Diesel engines use compression to ignite the diesel fuel. Gasoline engines use spark from a spark plug plus compression to ignite the fuel
2 main differences:
1. Diesel engines use compression to cause combustion, where as a gasoline engine will use a spark to cause combustion
2. Diesel and gasoline release different amounts of energy at different temperature when they combust
Therefore, if you think of an engine like a computer expecting certain inputs and responses, during an unexpected event (eg early/late combustion), all the other processes going on around the engine might not be able to respond correctly to the energy being released
Well, if I am not forgetting anything, the difference is this
Diesel gets compressed so much, it decides to make space itself and goes hot-hot and boom.
Gasoline gets compressed a lot, but it can’t get that much hot-hot, so it needs some help to make boom.
Fun fact. Diesel is much less flammable than gasoline, to the point where if you hold a lighter to diesel it will not ignite.
Source: am a former diesel mechanic
Really? What is going on with todays youth?
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