ST. LOUIS – Colorful displays are on the horizon as communities prepare for this week’s fireworks events.
The experts at the Saint Louis Science Center provided some insight as to what makes those explosions glow with a palette of colors. In the end, it all comes down to chemistry.
“So, the colors are really a result of taking different chemical elements. Every element on the periodic table has a little bit of a different reaction that it has when it gets energy from a fire. So it gives off different kinds of light,” Will Rieger, a scientist at the Saint Louis Science Center, said.
Sodium chloride, otherwise known as table salt, burns orange like normal flames.
“Sodium is used in fireworks. Usually, when it burns more intensely, it’ll go from that orange to more of a golden yellow,” Rieger said.
But when you swap out the sodium for strontium, you get a different color.
“Strontium is a pretty clean, really bright red color. You can see how much brighter and more energetic it is,” he said.
A third compound is copper chloride, which burns a bluish green.
“Very different from normal metallic copper like what you have in pennies,” Rieger said.
Other chemical compounds help make the explosions even more brilliant.
“Chemicals like potassium chlorate are used in fireworks to produce a much bigger, brighter flame. Essentially, this stuff’s not flammable but it does make stuff more flammable,” he said.
While the colors are just a single component of the explosions that we witness, many different materials are packaged, especially within a fireworks shell, to give the explosion different shapes and motions.
“Zinc is used to make smoke; aluminum makes a lot of bright sparks. When you package them together and create different kinds of effects, you’re changing how that stuff is exploding,” Rieger explained.
All this chemistry comes together to create a technicolor rainbow that fills up the nighttime sky.
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