June 2013
4 posts
Hey! Can you make a post for integrals like you did for derivatives? It was very helpful! And any other calculus topics as well would be MUCH appreciated. Thank you!
Of course we can! Coming right up.
(By the way username: under-lock-and-keyy we like your avatar because the Clear Science Staff are into heavy metals.)
May 2013
8 posts
how are you? =)
The Clear Science staff is fair to middling, how about you?
April 2013
8 posts
Is there a decay rate in heat at distance from a flame/heat source? Ie 6 inches away from a fire that's burning at 1200 deg F is what temp? 12" inches? Etc
This is a great question, anonymous! And a complicated one, because heat is a weird thing that moves from one place to another in multiple ways. When heat is absorbed by a substance, it raises the temperature of that substance. Heat can move by conduction, convection, and radiation.
In the coming days, the Clear Science staff will try to unpack this a little and throw some clarity on it.
But with the chlorine trifluoride, wouldn't you run the chance of high temperatures and the expelled oxygen creating fire in a carbon-rich environment?
The Clear Science Staff made no predictions about how pretty it would be! We will go out on a limb and say you’ll get some fluorides in the products.
Someone try this at home with ClF3 and tell us what happens. (DISCLAIMER: Don’t ever try this at home, never touch ClF3 unless you’re being paid well for it.)
Perhaps you could burn glass with chlorine trifluoride?
Chlorine trifluoride (ClF3) is a truly horrible chemical, which will in fact react with glass. What it does isn’t so much “burning” which is an oxidation, but is rather fluorination. This means it will strip the oxygens off the silicon atoms and add fluorine instead, making silicon fluoride compounds.
A common use of chlorine trifluoride is to fluorinate uranium, which is the first step in reprocessing nuclear material. This turns the uranium into uranium hexafluoride (UF6).
Maybe the anon means this: www(.)starfiredirect(.)com/fire-glass. Or another site: www(.)blazingglass(.)com/fire-crystals/ Perhaps I'm too stupid and overread it, but I couldn't find out yet how it works. This can't be /real/ glass or can it?
Hey anonymous, good question. We were talking about whether or not you could burn glass, and the Clear Science Staff said glass is an oxide already so it’s kind of pre-burned in a sense. This link is to a company that sells “fire glass.” What that is is small glass particles that sit in a fireplace, as a replacement for those fake logs you sometimes see.
The glass itself doesn’t burn. Rather, its a porous solid medium for natural gas to percolate through. The natural gas (mostly CH4) comes up through the glass particles, and it’s the CH4 and other gases that burn. The glass is just something to look pretty.
There’s some science to this, because if you heat up regular glass like that it could pop and break due to thermal expansion. Because of that, glass needs to be tempered the right way to allow it to experience big changes in temperature.
