As airfoilmod suggests, the exact physics of the fuel must surely be where the best minds are concentrated.
A friend of mine joined me and the kids at the weekend for a Chinese 'cook-in'. You know, root ginger, garlic, chillis stir fried, sweet and sour sauce from scratch ... superb smells from the kitchen and the kids just loved getting involved right from the initial shop we all did together at WalMart, to individually coating the chicken and prawns for deep fry, and then scoffing the lot
WalMart were right out of cornflower. My friend said potato flower worked just as good, and so it did.
But as the kids were coating the prawns and chicken in the water/flower mix, some of the physics emerged...I still find what we saw quite astounding all these years after I first saw the starch experiment at school.
One moment you are mixing the water and flower and saying "Its not quite right, shall we add some more? It's too runny"
Next you are saying well it fries good.
Then you return to the bowl and put your finger in and say "Wow, lookey here - it's gone hard!"
And you stir your finger and it becomes runny again before anyone can see what you meant.
And if you play further with it, and let it settle again, and remove just a tiny amount of the surface water, you can prize out the mixture in one bowl shaped solid, with the consistency of those bbq firelighters ... but you ain't gonna light no fires with it ...