Streaming TV shows and movies directly to your home is a breeze With Netflix. As a Netflix member, you can instantly watch TV and movies on your PC, Mac, mobile device, or television. Get a free thirty day trial membership. Go to Netflix dot com slash stuff and sign up today. Welcome to Brainstuff from hose stuff works dot com where smart happens. Hi. I'm Marshall Brain with today's question, why doesn't gasoline burn cleanly? Why do we end up with
things like smog and ozone that pollute disguise? Gasoline is a liquid formed almost purely of carbon and hydrogen. If you could somehow burn gasoline as a vapor with a hot flame and plenty of oxygen, you would get nearly pure carbon dioxide and water as the combustion products. That's why you can burn natural gas, LP gas and kerosene indoors in the winter, and appropriately designed kerosene heater, for example, can be ventless. Automobile exhaust, unfortunately, contains a lot more
than carbon dioxide and water. The most important pollutants and car exhaust include first, carbon monoxide, which is a poison. Carbon monoxide is formed because combustion is incomplete in the cylinder, not enough oxygen is available fast enough to react completely with all the carbon available. Second is nitrogen oxides. Because of the pressure and temperature inside the cylinder, nitrogen and oxygen in the air combined in various ways, we would
rather it didn't. And third is unburned hydrocarbons. Not all of the hydrocarbons participate in the reaction because there's so little time available during the combustion phase. There can also be some impurities, like sulfur in the gas to form sulfur oxides. The idea behind a kettalytic converter is to try to eliminate the carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and hydrocarbons
by reacting them with plenty of oxygen on a platinum catalyst. However, catalytic converters aren't perfect either, so some of the pollutants still escape. On hot summer days, we see the effect of these pollutants in the form of smog and ozone. Nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons mixed with air and get bombarded by ultraviolet rays and sunlight. Nitrogen dioxide releases an oxygen atom, which combines with oxygen gas to form O three or ozone at ground level. Do you have any ideas or
suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me an email at podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, go to how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the brain Stuff blog on the how stuff works dot com home page. This episode of brain Stuff is brought to you by Linda dot Com. Linda dot Com offers thousands of engaging, easy to follow video tutorials taught by industry experts to help you learn software, creative and
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