I'm thinking there's a couple of candidates who seem unaware of those 'pesky' things called 'facts' and rather sprout off garbage...I'm sure there's a Darwin Award in the making here
Smoking
- Thread starter Vulcan
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Agreed but you seem to carry on. Basic understanding air goes into the engine, oxygen from that air is removed and the resultant gases from combustion emitted from the exhaust. The amount of oxygen in the exhaust substantially reduced from the amount taken in by the engine. It doesnt take long for the level of oxygen to be reduced such that it can no longer support life.
And your gas boiler doesn't have a cat does it, so it produces ballpark 50 times as much co as your car idling. Before cats were introduced your car would be producing around 90+ times as much CO as a modern cat equipped vehicle. So the level of CO would reach lethal levels very quickly.
But I repeat, in a modern cat equipped vehicle, you will die from asphyxiation long before CO poisoning gets you, because the CO represents 0.2% of the exhaust, the other 99.08% of which is incapable of sustaining your life. So you will die due to lack of oxygen long before CO can build to lethal levels. Those are the facts, go and do some sums.
But I repeat, in a modern cat equipped vehicle, you will die from asphyxiation long before CO poisoning gets you, because the CO represents 0.2% of the exhaust, the other 99.08% of which is incapable of sustaining your life. So you will die due to lack of oxygen long before CO can build to lethal levels. Those are the facts, go and do some sums.
Blackswanwood
Still Learning
Reading through the posts is it not the case that before improvements were made to petrol and diesel engines the exhaust fumes would kill you with the high level of carbon monoxide being the cause?
Now that engines have been improved the exhaust fumes will still kill but more slowly as the level of carbon monoxide has been greatly reduced and the cause of death will be suffocation as the gases in the exhaust fumes replace the oxygen in the air?
Don’t try this at home.
Now that engines have been improved the exhaust fumes will still kill but more slowly as the level of carbon monoxide has been greatly reduced and the cause of death will be suffocation as the gases in the exhaust fumes replace the oxygen in the air?
Don’t try this at home.
You will be dead long before the oxygen in the air is reduced to where it won't support life...
(I tend to be paranoid because I used to work welding in confined spaces in my younger days- where air supply quality is vital- people have died from air contamination)
Here you have to pass a specialised course before you are legally allowed to do 'confined space welding' and you get some pretty graphic warnings of what happens when people ignore the basic safety rules...
So when people start sprouting what you find behind the south end of a northbound male bovine- well I will say my piece- and back it up with actual facts...
Something notably lacking from the other side so far- just snide comments and innuendo...
So far, the ONLY person who has done so- is ME...
You made the claim that your car/garage is so airtight that oxygen can't get in to replenish what is used... step up and present your evidence of this rather extraordinary claim....
Short of supergluing your lips to the exhaust pipe and sealing your nostrils shut- NO car or building is that airtight that the oxygen in the air around you won't be replenished at a far greater rate than it is being used...
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Go and put your hand over your exhaust pipe with the engine running. You will notice there is a significant pressure.
Now consider some very basic physics or just plain old common sense.
Take a container, doesn't matter what it is, but let's say your car. It contains air at ambient pressure. Now introduce a pipe feeding gas into that space at above ambient pressure. What happens?
The incoming higher pressure gas displaces the lower pressure gas in the container. Any leaks actually provide an exit point for the gas being displaced, so in fact speed up the process rather than mitigating it in any way.
If the container were completely sealed then what would happen is that the existing gas would be compressed by that coming in until such time as the pressure equalised. How much of each gas would be present at that point would depend upon their relative pressures and the volume of the container.
It is of course likely that in our hose through the window scenario some of the incoming gas may also escape, but overall the process is entirely predictable and inevitable.
The incoming gas will wholly displace that which is already there. At no point in this process will fresh air from the outside be able to enter the space, because it is at a lower pressure that the gas coming in, which will immediately raise the pressure inside above ambient, and continue to do so until the whole space is at the same pressure as the incoming gas.
So the original air will be replaced by a mixture which is composed almost entirely of Nitrogen and Carbon Dioxide, and you will die.
Another way of looking at this is to think of a tyre. Let us say it contains air at 10psi, and you inflate it to 30psi, using say argon. It will now contain a mixture of argon and air, but heavily biased towards argon.
Now let's make a hole in it. Now if we pump argon into it at 30psi initially a mixture of the original air and argon will come out of the hole. This will very quickly change to pure argon as all the air is expelled. At no point will air somehow be able to sneak back in !
Typically an idling engine will consume in the region of 5-7 cubic metres of air per hour per litre of capacity, and convert it into an unbreathable gas cocktail so you can readily see that it won't take long to produce enough exhaust gas to fill your car and kill you.
You have obviously never worked in a clean room environment where this is the process used to prevent contamination, namely the pressure is maintained at a higher level than outside in order to prevent dust and other contaminants entering.
I have absolutely no desire to get into the unnecessarily antagonist debate above but I wondered if lack of oxygen to the car engine would cause it to stop before lack of oxygen to the individual caused them to die.
Please, only reasoned answers; it's a genuine question
Please, only reasoned answers; it's a genuine question
