What is fire....or is that question too scientific?

Question

not the chemical formula or anything, Im just asking is it just hot fuel or what? how is it orange? how is it the coolest thing on earth.....i am a PYROMANIAC I GEUSS!

Answer 1

A regular fire, like in a fireplace or campfire, consists of burning organic material such as wood or other plant material which is mainly made from Carbon, with hydrogen. When the wood burns, the carbon combines with oxygen. It releases a lot of energy that was stored in the chemical bonds of the wood.

As the wood burns, some of it is very hot, and other parts are not yet hot, are heating up or are being burned loose and carried away by the currents of air moving between the sticks of wood. So the fire is giving off Carbon dioxide, partially burned fractions of the wood, hot ut unburned pieces of the wood, and pieces of wood that are hardly hot at all. In some cases, there will be carbon atoms that are hot but they were in a part of the fire where all the oxygen had been used up, so those atoms may be hot but not burned.

All these various materials can be glowing with heat. Because they are all different temperatures, they have different colors. It might be easier to see this in a candle flame than in a fire.

If you look at the candle flame you see a part where the actual combustion is taking place - that is, where there are carbon atoms actually in the process of combining with oxygen. That area might be quite hot and have no color at all. But there is probably an area above that which is yellow - that's probably unburned carbon atoms which are glowing from heat, but they are cooling off. As they cool off you see an area where they are no longer yellow. If you put a cool piece of glass or metal in that part of the flame, it will collect a coating of the unburned carbon atoms, what we call 'soot'.

People have been looking at candles for a long time, trying to understand how the burning process works. So I think you could go all the way back to Michael Faraday in the mid 1800s for a book on candles and flames, and some updated versions on the web.

Answer 2

Fire is the visual manifestation of gases produced by combustion. Notice a fire: you see lots of colors; these colors depend upon what is being "burned"; the area of greatest heat may be blue while the flame itself is yellow. All have to do with the radiation in the visual spectrum that reaches the eye. Look at a fire with an infrared camera and you see different colors.

Answer 3

Fire is the result of the rapid reaction of oxygen with a carbon based substance. Since oxygen is the most electronegative element after fluorine, and since oxygen comprises 18% of the Earth's atmosphere, it is a relatively common phenomena. Fire is orange due to energy being released as a wavelength which our eyes preceive as "orange".

Answer 4

Just like iron turns red hot, so does air... fire is just "red hot air"

-jose-

Answer 5

Pure fire is colorless.