soma - 9-12-2015 at 00:35
Seeing as silanes and cyclosilanes are very similar to alkanes, why can't they be used as gasoline?
DraconicAcid - 9-12-2015 at 00:57
For one thing, your engine would quickly become full of SiO2, which is not a gas that easily leaves the engine like CO2 does.
morsagh - 9-12-2015 at 11:01
We use hydrocarbons because we don´t have to synthetise it, they are here natural. If we had to synthestise hydrocarbons than it will be very
expensive and nobody will use it for fuel. Silanes aren´t naturally occurring so they are much more expensive.
DraconicAcid - 9-12-2015 at 11:34
They also tend to be pyrophoric. The activation energy for the combustion of a silane is much small than that of a hydrocarbon, probably because
silicon has available d orbitals, and can form five-coordinate intermediates a lot more easily (same reason that SiCl4 hydrolyzes rapidly, while CCl4
does not).