Have you seen this!?! Burning saltwater

Jeremy Fowler jeremy.f76 at gmail.com
Thu Sep 13 09:41:56 CDT 2007


I was watching Mythbusters last night, and they were doing all kinds of
explosive experiments. In one experiment, they made a Pringles can explode
using hydrogen and leaving the chips fairly intact.  One thing they pointed
out was that Hydrogen, when it burns, has a clear, nearly invisible white
flame. This got me thinking about the burning saltwater, which was an
orange-yellow flame. So, its probably not the Hydrogen burning. So that got
me wondering what was burning in that saltwater. Well, maybe its the salt I
thought. Salt, Sodium chloride, is fairly inert. However, Sodium by itself
is really active and quite explosive when it comes into contact with water.
Here's a great site with a guy doing sodium experiments, including throwing
it into water and burning it:

http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Stories/011.2/

If you look at the sodium flame, its a similar orange-yellow flame in the
saltwater experiments. So, it highly probable the RF is making the sodium in
the water burn. So, what to you amateur chemists and physicists have to say
about this? Is it still a possible fuel source if its only burning the
sodium?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://kclug.org/pipermail/kclug/attachments/20070913/65891de5/attachment.htm 


More information about the Kclug mailing list