Item — HN Reader

> very viscous > I assure you I’m not

> bunker fuel is solidity

You seems to be knowledgeable in that domain and has something interesting to share but I don’t understand your point. What is the scale 0.00-9.00 ? What is the preside point you don’t agree with GP? Please EMLI5.

2 comments

My point is that it's misleading to people who don't have reason to deal in liquid fuels to characterize bunker oil as thick or viscous when it's only thick relative to fuels (which are generally pretty thin, they mostly pour like water) despite not being particularly viscous absolutely.

It's on the same order as most petroleum oils that people deal with and thinner than pretty much every petroleum product that is generally characterized as thick. Thinner grades of motor oil and most hydraulic oil is a bit thinner but thicker grades of motor oil, gear oils, all sorts of greases and tars are all more viscous. Bunker oil doesn't "need" to be heated to be pumped any more than motor oil does though heating it and the accompanying thinning does a lot to help with combustion which is why they do it (and then the rest of the systems that handle it get designed to take advantage of this) and invoking the fact that this is done kind of implies a comparison with the other petroleum products that get heated before being used and in most people's experience this is going to be products used to patch roofs and roads which is unhelpful because those don't even flow except at the highest extreme of naturally occurring temperatures. The only context in which bunker oil is particularly thick is if you're a fuel supplier and spend all day dealing in much less viscous stuff.

I guess it's just pedantry at the end of the day.

And yes, the numbers were timestamp references.

I've seen bunker fuel in a ship, and its consistency was best described as "tar-like". Mind, n=1 and uses may vary, but bunker fuel can be exceedingly thick. All the more so on high-latitude routes with fuel tanks near the outer hull and cooled by ambient water temperatures near freezing.

Decidedly thicker than automotive oil, and probably thicker than axle grease or vaseline / petroleum jelly.

The ship in which that was used (triple-expansion steam engine, late 1800s design, built and used during WWII) directed spent steam around the incoming fuel flow directly prior to boiler injection, and that steam then wrapped around the fuel line and part of the fuel tank itself to heat the oil to the point it would flow.

Side note: Venezuelan oil is very thick and viscous, and requires mixing with lighter fractions of petroleum to be pumped out of wells. Venezuela typically imports what would otherwise be waste light fractions of petroleum, generally from the US or Nigeria (heavily dependent on political winds) in order to do this. A significant fraction of US petroleum exports go to this or similar uses. (I suspect Canadian tar sands see similar treatment though I don't have a source on this.)

The differences in opinion here may be because we're comparing #6 in a cold ambient environment to #5/#6 in a warm ambient environment. Still, #6 is no grease.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil#Maritime_fuel_classif...

> What is the scale 0.00-9.00 ?

Referring to the timestamps in the linked video (i.e. from the start of the video to 9 minutes).