Why is ethanol a hydrocarbon if it is miscible with water and why does it not produce soot when burned like gasoline, paraffin, diesel, etc.?

Question

Is it because of the short chain structure of the molecular formula C²H⁶O that ethanol doesn't produce soot? Nevertheless, I have a very small amount of soot in my ethanol tabletop fireplace. Where does it come from? & according to the internet (Chemie.de), hydrocarbons are insoluble in water. Why is this not true for ethanol?

squirreline · Answer

Water soluble because it has an OH group (alcohol)

ausmeinemalltag · Answer

From the Internet:

The longer the organic residue of an alcohol molecule is, the less soluble the alcohol is in hydrophilic solvents such as water.

The organic residue in ethanol is still quite short.

Even octanol dissolves very poorly in water.

thomasjnewton · Answer

Hydrocarbons contain ONLY carbon and hydrogen, so ethanol, like all alcohols, is NOT. Ethanol is polar because of its OH group, and of course because the nonpolar portion consisting of two carbon atoms doesn't offset this. Propanol and isopropanol are also miscible with water; of the butanols, only tert-butanol is miscible because the nonpolar portion is quite compact.

As for the sooting, I have two explanations:

Ethanol already contains one oxygen atom, so it doesn't have to come from the air to completely oxidize the carbon.
Different gases contain a certain number of particles, regardless of their size or weight, provided the pressure isn't too high or the temperature too low. For example, if you take hexane or heptane, which have a similar boiling point to ethanol, there's a similar number of particles in the gas mixture above the liquid, but three or three and a half times as much oxygen is needed to oxidize the carbon.

segler1968 · Answer

Ethanol also produces so much. Ask the pots on my spirit stove...