[Stoves] Rice Hull Delight (and the color of flames)

[Kevin Chisholm]

Dear AD

My guess is that the problem is not temperature, but solubility. I am 
guessing that the NaCl is not soluble in kerosene, and that there simply 
was no Na in the kerosene flame.

I am guessing that the NaCl will color a relatively cool flame. You can 
easily test this with an open fire, and a salt shaker... simply sprinkle 
salt on the fire, and see what happens!! :-)

If it would be advantagteous to you, to be able to make a yellow flame, 
it might be possible to find a compound that dissolves NaCl and also, is 
miscible with kerosene. Similarily, with copper salts, you can get a 
lovely green flame with one form of copper, or a beautiful blue flame, 
with a different form of copper. Again, you can experiment with copper 
in a flame with pieces of copper wire in a wood fire.

In the refrigeration industry, a heated copper surface is used as a very 
sensitive detector for finding the source of a halocarbon leak... the 
device has a small hose that aspirates air from possible leakage sites 
and directs it to teh heated copper... the flame turns green when 
halocarbons are present.

Best wishes,

Kevin

adkarve wrote:
> Dear Stovers,
> I remembered the highschool experiment of producing a bright yellow flame by
> heating a sodium salt on a platinum wire in a Bunsen burner flame I tried to
> produce a similar bright yellow flame by adding a sodium compound to
> kerosene in a hurricane lantern . However my experiment with kerosene spiked
> with a sodium salt did not produce the desired bright yellow flame. When I
> asked a chemistry expert about the cause of this failure of my experiment,
> he told me that it required very high temperature for sodium to impart
> yellow colour to a flame (i.e. at a temperature much higher than that
> produced by a hurricane lantern.
> Yours
> A.D.Karve
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Paul S. Anderson <psanders at ilstu.edu>
> To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves <stoves at listserv.repp.org>; Jeff
> Davis <jeff0124 at velocity.net>; Alexis Belonio - Philippines
> <atbelonio at yahoo.com>
> Cc: <stoves at listserv.repp.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2007 9:19 AM
> Subject: Re: [Stoves] Rice Hull Delight (and the color of flames)
> 
> 
> Dear Alexis, (and others),
> 
> Again we read (below) about the clean blue flame of gasified rice
> hulls.  Please
> enlighten us about the different chemical characteristics of rice husks.
> 
> I believe that they do not have much of something (is it low sodium?)
> that gives
> so much of the yellow color in the flames of other biomass?
> 
> Or is there something else that helps avoid the yellow? or that causes the
> yellow in the flames of other biomass?
> 
> Paul
> 
> --
> Paul S. Anderson, Ph.D., Geography professor - Emeritus
> Telephone:  USA-309-452-7072 (residence and office)
> Internet site:  www.ilstu.edu/~psanders
> For my gasifier stoves info, go to:
> http://bioenergylists.org/contributors#Paul_Anderson
> 
> 
> Quoting Jeff Davis <jeff0124 at velocity.net>:
> 
>> Dear All,
>>
>> Yesterday I had a 15 min run with rice hulls in the Gas-of-Fire 1000, and
>> then time was up.
>>
>> Today the Gas-of-Fire ran on 100% rice hulls for a minimum of 30 minutes.
>>
>> The flame was more sensitive to the wind than Woodgas but it was a true
>> blue flame, some nice clean gas. When the flame went out you could not see
>> much of any smoke! This gas was easy to relight. As you can see my burner
>> is of poor design.
>>
>> It would seem that anybody with a supply of rice hulls is blessed with one
>> of nature's wonderful fuels!
>>
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>>
>> Jeff
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jeff Davis
>>
>> Some where 20 miles south of Lake Erie, USA
>>
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> 
> 
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