I was looking up the solubility of lithium chloride and it's way more than ordinary table salt according to the properties chart on the right side of these pages, which is kind of nice for that intense red color. I bought some potable 190 proof Everclear awhile back to run some small jam jars in the house briefly thinking the odor would be less objectionable than methanol. You get incomplete combustion with jam jars and you can smell formaldehyde as well as the methanol vapors. Ethanol is not much better, there's an odor of acetaldehyde which is not really good to breathe either. Apparently LiCl is soluble in ethanol too, but to a lesser extent and with Everclear there's 5% water which might help slightly. The denatured alcohol you buy is often roughly a 50/50 mix of methanol and ethanol. But methanol is better for not interfering with the colorants as you mentioned.pulsethug wrote:Mark,
I bought the lithium chloride specifically for it's methanol flame coloring capability. Strontium nitrate produces red as well. My two faves are lithium for cherry red and boric acid for the ghostly green. I'll have to give copper a try. Is there some specific copper salt you would recommend e.g. copper chloride? Would the copper salt vibrate blue or green? A bright blue would be awesome.
For those who are unfamiliar with what we are talking about, methanol is the only liquid hydrocarbon that acts like water in that it can dissolve ionic metal salts. Methanol is also very simple and tends to burn completely and does not release any excess carbon atoms. The type of salt dissolved in the methanol will vibrate in it's intrinsic spectrographic color within the methanol flame. Carbon vibrates bright yellow, so it is very important that no carbon based substances are allowed to contaminate the methanol/salt mix. Any carbon contamination will make the flame burn bright yellow and swamp out any other desired color.
The powered titanium you speak of is probably titanium sponge. Titanium sponge is the raw titanium metal produced during the electrolysis process to refine the metal. And yeah, it burns very hot! Now I have heard of solid magnesium catching fire, but not titanium, or aluminum for that matter. Aluminum flakes and powder are used extensively in fireworks as well. Titanium was the metal used for the SR-71 spy plane. So I'm hoping it will not burst into flames. At least not right away. Once the airframe is 100 feet in the air, then it's ok . Thanks for the links by the way. I hope to have the TiJet tig welded up in the next week or two. I'll keep all of you posted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_chloride
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_chloride
"Cleans glass and is used as a fuel for marine stoves"
https://www.korellis.com/wordpress/wp-c ... atured.pdf
"Denatured Alcohol is used as a marine stove fuel. Always follow manufacturer's
directions."
http://www.sunnysidecorp.com/info_sheet ... ta%20Sheet
Tidbits
Found this on boric acid solubility.
in methanol 173.9 g/L at 25 deg C; in ethanol 94.4 g/L at 25 deg C
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compou ... ting-Point
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocarbon