What is Chemical Reaction

We see a lot of chemical reactions in our daily life all the time. Fire, respiration, and cooking all involve chemical reactions. To put it in a simple way, chemical reaction is any transformation from one set of chemicals into another set.

Since we can’t see the chemicals at molecular level, we will need to see the change which is visible to naked eye to confirm that a chemical reaction has occurred. A chemical reaction is often accompanied by a temperature change, bubbles, color change, or precipitate formation.

Usually, chemical properties permanently change. Let us take an example. Consider our breakfast, we start with raw eggs and then cook them in a skillet. In the end we have very different eggs than what we started with. They not only do they look different physically, but you have also permanently changed the structure of the eggs' proteins. No longer a runny clear liquid, eggs are solid, bright white, and very yummy… J

Take another example, Melting ice does nothing to change the chemical properties of the water itself, like we just saw with eggs. It might be in a different phase, but we can easily re-freeze the water back into ice and this will be the same ice which we started with. No permanent physical changes occurred.

How to make Colored Fire...

Well we can’t get green color flame if we throw green color paper into fire. There is some science behind the colored fire. I have tried to put it in the simplest way possible procedure to produce colored fire in safe and easy way.

It is actually the different chemicals used which produce the different color. Below listed are some of the chemicals and the colors which they produce when burnt.

• Blue  - Cupric chloride
• Red  -  Lithium chloride
• Red   - Strontium chloride
• Green -  Cupric sulfate
• Orange -  Borax (Sodium borate)
• Orange  - Calcium chloride
• Purple -  Potassium chloride
• Yellow  - Sodium chloride
• Yellow  - Sodium carbonate
• Blue   - Cupric chloride
• Red   - Lithium chloride
• Red   - Strontium chloride
• Green  -  Copper sulfate
• Orange  -  Sodium borate
• Orange  - Calcium chloride
• Purple   - Potassium chloride
• Yellow   - Sodium chloride
• Yellow   - Sodium carbonate
• White sparks  - Magnesium ribbon
• Yellow sparks  -  Iron filings

How to do it: Take a plastic container and add a gallon of water. To this add roughly around 400 grams of any of the above chemical and mix it well to form  a solution (most of the above salts are water soluble). Now take your dried material (wood logs, wood chips or any other fire source , preferably wood) and soak it in the above prepared chemical solution for one day. Now take the soaked material and dry it until all the water has dried up. By now the chemical must have been absorbed onto the fire source very well. Now just burn the wooden logs like how you do with your normal wooden logs and enjoy a cool color fireplace. Use multiple colored soaked logs for multiple fire colors. Make sure to use proper safety equipment will preparing these.

Note: You can proportionately add the chemical to water. i.e. you can add even 200 grams to half gallon of water also.