it you spread a gallon of oil over 30 miles by drops how far apart would the drops be.?

Question

My car gets about 30 miles to the gallon and it seems like a long distance to spread all the oil on the road if it were evenly spread, even if it was by one drop at a time

Answer 1

There isn't enough information to answer the question. But lets make a few assumptions purely to come up with a answer.

Say the car is traveling at 60mph or 1 mile a minute so it would cover the the distance in 30mins. Lets also assume the oil droplets are 1 cc in volume or about the same as an M&M There are 3,785.4cc in 1 US Gallon.

Now to figure our our rate of flow or the rate the oil droplets fell you would take the total number of droplets / total time. Well use seconds for our time measurement, and there are 1,800 seconds in 30mins. So it would be 3,785 / 1,800 = 2.1 droplets / sec.

Next we need to find out how much distance is covered in one second. At 60mph you cover 5280ft per minute or 88ft / sec.

Now we can take out rate 2.1 / sec and speed 88ft / sec and devide 88 by 2.1 to get our distance between each oil droplet of 41.9 feet.

This is isn't taking any thing else into account like wind, distance between the oil drip source and the ground, etc.

Answer 2

Take a liquid measuring cup, and measure out 1/4 ounce of water, then with the use of a device such as a syringe or some other kind of way, slowly empty it out in drops while counting.

It's a bit rough, but keeping in mind a gallon contains 128 ounces, multiply the number of drops you counted by 512 (128 / 0.25) which is 4 times 128 due to 1/4 ounce... Per 30 miles the resulting thousands of drops may or may not seem so amazing anymore, and with fuel injection it doesn't take much to atomize fuel into combustible form... But what amazes me is that at 2,000 rpm's a 6-cylinder engine fires 12,000 times per minute, and if it takes 30 minutes to cover 30 miles at 60mph, then the engine has fired off a total of 360,000 times on one gallon of petrol, which translates to around 28,000 explosions per ounce, it does appear mind boggling how far fuel goes in a car.

Best I can think is the combustible mixture in the chamber must be around 98 or 99 percent air, and a tiny drop of fuel that got atomized, but idk, idk...

Answer 3

ahhhh yes I see you found a way to dispose of that crap from your last oil change ! . Oh and if your going to do it late at night when nobody is watching drop by drop you will have to go at least 75 miles an hour for the drops to be exactly land exactly 2mm apart for 30 miles!

Answer 4

Are you trying to concoct a method to find your way home? Like Hansel and Grettle?

They have GPS devices now that make this easier. Get one.

Answer 5

depends on how big the drops are or what measure you use for the drops

Answer 6

depends on size of drops,since they are never the same

Answer 7

it would be every couple of feet