What do the different colors of flame mean, and which is the hottest?

Question

If it does have to do with temperature, what do the colors come from and what is the order of their ranking?

Answer 1

There are two types of flames....luminous and non-luminous.
A luminous flame is generally what everyone is familiar with, it is the bright yellow flame which gives off light....for example on a birthday candle. In a luminous flame the fuel (be it wax, wood, ...) is not undergoing complete combustion, it does not get all the Oxygen it needs.
A non-luminous flame is not nearly as bright as a luminous flame, at times, it can almost be colorless. A luminous flame is undergoing complete combustion since it is drawing in much more Oxygen and the flame is getting much hotter.
A picture of a non-luminous flame can be seen here,
http://www.amazingrust.com/Experiments/how_to/Images/flame.jpg

You can see that there are several "zones" within a non-luminous flame, each zone is a different temperature. The hottest part of the flame is right where the wire is being held in the above linked picture...right above the small inner cone.

A flame being colored (orange, green, blue, purple, ...) in and of itself works off of a different phenomenon and does not necessarily mean that a flame is hotter / cooler than another,
http://www.amazingrust.com/Experiments/how_to/Flame_Test.html

Answer 2

Color Of The Hottest Flame

Answer 3

The best way to describe that is by the idea of spectroscopy. It has to do with it's energy. the more energy a substance contains the different colors it will show. blue being the most energy (and hottest flame moving backwards dow the ROY G. BIV thing we learned in elementry school to red having the least energy. The same reason why the sky is red at sunset. your are getting less energy from the sun when it is horizontal to you (because it is passing through more atmosphere) and in turn the only color that can get to you is red. pretty cool eh?

Answer 4

This Site Might Help You.

RE:
What do the different colors of flame mean, and which is the hottest?
If it does have to do with temperature, what do the colors come from and what is the order of their ranking?

Answer 5

It depends on the fuel being combusted. You are probably familiar with people or teachers saying that a particular colour is hotter than another because they are referencing only one particular fuel (the one being used). In any given flame there will be regions that are hotter than others and each region may give off a unique colour (unless it is an invisible flame). But a blue flame from one substance may be hotter than an orange flame from another, so it is all relative. You can only really start colour coding when you are only talking about one specific fuel. Once you throw other fuels into the mixture you have to differentiate between them.
Cheers.

Answer 6

Actually, the colors often have nothing to do with how hot the flame is, but actually what is burning.

For instance, Methane I believe, has no color at all when it burns. It is invisable, where as propane can have a blue color, etc.
If in a natural gas setting, the flame is usually blue, but if you add Boron, it will turn bright green, or sodium is a really bright yellow, and lithium will turn your flame to a Red/crimson color.

Answer 7

There are two causes for flame color: temperature and fuel.

Flame temperature can cause the color to go from infra red at one end to ultra violet at the other end of the light spectrum. Light, flame color, at the red end is cooler than light at the violet end. Another way to put that is that red indicates lower energy than violet.

The fuel burned to cause a flame can also affect the flame color. Cobalt, for example, burns a beautiful blue; sodium burns bright yellow.

Answer 8

generally the brighter the cooler, the cooler the flame. therefore luminous flame is alot hotter than non luminous flame. To put things simply, imagine not all energy is converted to heat but sum got converted to light instead hence its not as hot. Also blue is hotter than red as blue as light energys are different due to their frequency. Colour of flame is also determined by the substance burning.

Answer 9

it is not the temperature of the flame that generates the colour within the flame. if you burn hydrogen gas, the flame is quite literally invisible to the naked eye.

the quality of the fuel, the oxygen content and the impurities in the fuel itself are what causes the colour differences.

as a cigar smoker, i can tell you that there are different types of butane fuels, as far as quality of purity, that can cause a lighters jets to clog up.

-eagle

Answer 10

This shows the "jumping" of electrons from one energy level to another. Whne they jump back to their original energy level, they emit energy in form of light. The amount of energy is manifested by the color emitted. WHITISH lights are hottest ROYGBIV is arranged in such a way that red is the coldest(least energy emitted) and Violet is the hottest(highest energy emitted). Different substances emit diffrent energies so when they burn, they emit different colors of light...

=) ten poiunts please...joke (but i really want to go to the next level, plss)