endothermic flame???

[pigeon_soup]

hi

 

i am interested in wither or not a cold flame is possable, i concluded that were it possable the flame would have to be endothermic (takes in heat energy from its surroundings) and despite researching through all the books at home at my old school and my colledge i found nothing on the subject, and so i turned to the internet for gidance and all i found was many pages on the quenching of a flame using an endothermic reaction.

 

thank you for any useful input on the matter.

[insane_alien]

it wouldn't work, combustion is always exothermic. it releases heat. thats how it can remain self sustaining as long as there is fuel present. i'm not sure if any endothermic reactions will produce a plasma even if they are kept at high temperatures.

 

i don't hink its possible to have a cold flame where cold is in human terms.

[swansont]

You'd need an increase in the free energy of the system (probably Helmholtz free energy, but it's been a while since I did any real thermo). That is, you'd need an increase in entropy to offset the absorption of heat. It might be possible if one or both of the reactants are solid or liquid, especially if they are big molecules (many constituent atoms) that form several molecules when they react. But I don't know if you can get this with combustion.

[pigeon_soup]

thanks for your input guys, its a question that came to me one day when i was sat at coledge and charlie (the guy whos bodymass is in minus figures) was complaining it was cold and said that he wanted to be near the nice warm fire, but i, being slightly special (a p.c way of saying that im retared) and only paying half attention to the conversation at the time (they were deep in conversation about the beauty of the recptionist and i had my head burried in my shiny new book- the gospal of the flying spegetti monster), heard chralie say 'i want to be by the nice cold fire' at which point i said 'is that possible' to whice everyone looked at me and james(aparrently being rather a simplyton but infact was pointing out that i was the slightly simple one) said 'yeah corse u cn get a nice warm fire', and os i explained what i though i had heard, accompanied by comments of 'errr. ur stupid' and '****ing retard' from james side of the table, firmly restablishing him self as high lord of the simpletons that dont quite understand that he is infact the simpler of the group. and so two months later i remembered my ponder of the many moons ago and i traveled to the computer room of my coledge and i googled it with no helpful results, and so i googled science forums and here i am.

 

wow did i realy just blab all that?? hmmmm... dont feel obliged to read!

[pigeon_soup]

sorry i when realy off topic there kinda lol. anyway i checked some of the other forumns i posted on and this arrose-

 

it was sujested that as a flame consits of a gas heated as to excite the electrons that when they come back to ground state release photons of light, if it where posable to find a gas that could have its electrons excited whilst remaining at a low tmeprature this would be possable, i the suggested that-

 

could the elcetrons be excited through a form of electrolisys? could a catilyst be used in a useful way to aid the exciteing of the electrons without a large increase in temprature.

 

any ideas/sugestions?

[YT2095]

if you`re simply thinking of higher energy states to give of light but now heat (and that`s exactly all a cold fire would do) then maybe something like Chemiluminescence (glow sticks) would be what you`re after.

electroluminescence and triboluminescence maybe worth looking into also.