Alcohols as fuels.

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Alcohols as fuels

Introduction: Alcohols, as most of us know burn quite well in air (they react with oxygen when heated in air). This means we could use alcohol as a fuel to produce energy, as the reaction with air is exothermic. What effect would using different alcohols as fuels have? We might expect to find that larger alcohol molecules could be burned to give out larger amounts of energy, as the structure contains more chains of molecules which can react with oxygen to release more energy. In this investigation, we shall test a range of alcohols to see how much energy each releases when combusted.

Plan: We shall be investigating how different alcohols give out different amounts of energy when burnt in air. We shall be using methanol, ethanol, propanol, butanol and pentan-1-ol in this investigation. The best way to perform the experiment to find out how much energy is given out by each alcohol is to use alcohol burners. These are short glass cylinders which are sealed off at the top. They have a short piece of rope reaching from the bottom of inside the burner (where the alcohol would be) to a hole with a