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magnesium mystery
🕑 Added 2020-07-25 22:22:00 +0000 UTCI've burned a lot of things on my plasma generator for my upcoming video. I used electrodes of various metals as well as carbon electrodes loaded with various metal salts. Those behaved fairly predictably for the most part, although some were much more exciting than others. That being said, magnesium threw a hard curve ball.
As you can see in the video, it produces MANY different colors. Not just little bits of color either, the flames switches dramatically to a deep red and switches chaotically to green, orange, and white, and sometimes exhibiting multiple colors at once. I have no explanation for this. I was not able to get a good spectrum of the flame yesterday but I will try again. I don't know why it produces these colors on the RF oscillator but won't when burned regularly. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this phenomenon.
Comments
Ristomatti Airo
I'm avoiding these "spoilers" myself as I'm more of a fan of your "full featured" videos. But somehow I'm having a feeling YouTube is anticipating your next video by pushing this to my feed: https://youtu.be/tc--Mr2rp1c
Thor Ostergard
Fascinating question, Drake. Please allow me to posit preliminarily 2 separate processes, but briefly: 1) CHEMICAL, whilst Mg3N2 (from 3Mg + N2>>>Mg3N2) is a dull, muted greenish powder, I have not done a flame test specifically. It seems iffy as the cause of a green flame as a flame test on Mg itself is odorless/white. Next, Mg + H2O in air >>>MgO + H2 gas which does burn with an ORANGE flame in air. 2) PHYSICAL, you are creating and generating highly energized streams of electrons (Hmmm???...if I may say, not totally unlike those of the Solar Wind from a CME). Here comes the RED as excited diatomic N2 (not the ionized diatomic N2+) emits photons at 650-680nm. During intense geomagnetic storms this red can even be so intense as to cover the whole sky. As for the GREEN, oxygen on de-excitation can emit a wide variety of wavelengths, but very commonly a 550 nm light green. So there you have Orange, Red, and Green. Now for two questions of you, Drake: 1) Did you end up with many spots of MgO on the concrete floor? and 2) With this experiment did you smell the production of ozone?
p4ck3ts3nd3r
Maybe the different colors, in different parts of the stick, are from impurities in the stick?...
Ray Hahn
Is that a product from using the new pole transformer you recently purchased?
Andrew Hackard
Holy shit, that looked amazing.
Max-Joseph Krempl
Sorry, if this theory doesn't make any sense, I don't know much about these things. But couldn't it be that the radicals produced by those arcs form some molecule with the magnesium which then burns with a different color?
