styropyro
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tesla coil chemistry
🕑 Added 2021-04-23 00:21:15 +0000 UTCI appreciate all of the nice comments on the last post of mine. You guys are too kind.
Here are a couple clips from my experiments with tesla coils and fire. It turns out it's much harder to "paint" the arc of a tesla coil compared to an arc that's higher current (hotter) but I did find some cool exceptions. The volatile boron compound trimethyl borate does a great job of lighting up a tesla coil arc, and makes a very bright green flame when an arc is going through it. It's crazy how bright it becomes actually, because the normal flame is only visible in darkness.
Metallic lithium gives incredible results as a breakout electrode, and I can't even do it justice with the camera. The ENTIRE arc becomes red at some points, with colors shooting through the arc giving a shimmering effect. I wonder if the relatively small lithium atoms are traveling along the electric plasma channel?? Nothing else gave an effect like that, not even sodium metal!
I'm doing my final experiments for this video over the next few days, where I convert the circuit into an RF autotransformer and feed a bunch of the periodic table to it. Stay tuned!
Comments
Sean Daggett
I share the joy of the colors of lithium, but in a different way. No, not inhaling! I work with lithium power banks that can give off incredible discharge if the BMS is bypassed. We had an dead short across the positive and negative posts, and the plasma ball (the best way I can describe it) created was intense!
p4ck3ts3nd3r
The lithium already looked amazing, but with what you said about it, I wish the camera could have picked that up...
