how would frozen fuel burn?

[MacNetix]

I have been speculating what would happen if you lit a block of frozen fuel (like white gas, kerosene, or lamp oil) on fire? I know that it will not burn while it is still frozen, but once you start to apply fire, I imagine it would melt and then the fumes would be able to ignite. The fuel would have to be frozen with dry ice or maybe something even colder. I'm not sure if the fuel would instantly thaw and explode... or what? If it did explode would it be the same as throwing a match into the same amount of fuel in a bucket, or would it be smaller/larger? What I'd love to see it do is to just slowly melt and burn (maybe with increasing intensity as it gets hotter and melts faster).

 

I'm tempted to try this experiment out on a small scale, and would love some scientific advise beforehand.

 

Any thoughts?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

All you have to do to get something to burn is supply oxygen and heat it past the activation energy for the combustion reaction. That should be easy enough: apply a blowtorch to one corner of the block and it'll eventually melt that bit and let it catch. Ideally, the part you melted would produce enough energy to melt even more and light it, which would melt yet more, etc... although there's a chance it wouldn't produce enough energy to melt more fuel and would instead just fizzle out.

[big314mp]

There is something known as the "flash point" which is the lowest temperature that a fuel will support combustion in air. Gasoline has a flash point of -40C, so dry ice would be cold enough to stop combustion. The CO2 from the dry ice would also extinguish your match

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_point

 

What Cap'n said works (sometimes) because the fire is able to heat the area around it sufficiently to raise the temperature above the flash point.

[YT2095]

candle wax is a frozen fuel, it`s a simple alkane no different to butane or octane, it`s just longer and thus has a higher melting point.

perhaps it would help you to think of it that way

[MacNetix]

wow, it sounds like it actually would work. I see what you are saying about the match going out, but I'd likely set it up with a torch that lights it so I'm not anywhere near it. Would gasoline be an acceptable fuel for this then? How quickly would the gas melt before I light it? Maybe I would just need to let it start melting and then light the fumes around it. That way I'm not just lighting a corner and can actually burn it uniformly. The whole idea here is to make it look nice. I will probably make a mold to pour the gas in, then place that mold in with the dry ice. Once frozen I can remove it from the mold and place it on my torch platform and burn the ice sculpture

 

Thanks for all the advice. I'm very excited to try this out. And don't worry, I realize how extremely dangerous this can potentially be and will be very careful!