Novel yellow colored flame compositions with superior spectral performance

Abstract

The production of colored flames is the primary purpose of military signaling, projectile tracing, and illuminating devices. Certain elements and compounds when heated to high temperature have the unique property of emitting lines or narrow bands in the visible region (380–780 nm). This study, reports on the development of novel yellow colored flame compositions with enhanced spectral performance in terms of luminous intensity, and color quality to standard Russian yellow tracer. The light intensity and the imprint spectra of developed yellow flares were measured using digital luxmeter and UV–Vis. spectrometer respectively. The main giving of this study is that the light intensity, and color quality of Russian yellow tracer were improved by 287%, and 170% respectively. This was accomplished by means of optimizing the ratio of novel binder to color source using aluminum metal fuel. Aluminum-based formulations were found to maximize the formation of yellow reactive emitting specimens, and to eliminate any interfering incandescent emission resulted from MgO. Quantification of yellow color emitting specimens in the combustion gaseous products was achieved using chemical equilibrium thermodynamic code named ICT (Institute of Chemical Technology in Germany, Virgin 2008); in an attempt to judge the light quality. This improvement in yellow flare performance established the rule that the emission intensity increases as the reaction temperature increases. In the meantime upper limit of temperature was avoided to maximize the color quality.

Keywords

• Pyrotechnics
• Colored flames
• Yellow tracer
• Atomic spectroscopy
• Color quality