Rainbow Fire

[deleted-189676]

Hello,

I am a teacher looking to order materials for one of my students interested in doing the Rainbow fire project. I work in Nunavik (northern Canada) in an isolated village, and the due date is Feb 28th, so I fear ordering the kit would take too long, and we already have most of the materials necessary. My questions are:

1. I am looking to order boric acid and strontium chloride from Boreal Canada online, which form of boric acid should I order, granular or crystal?

2. Living in the north, means doing the experiment outside is out of the question, and we do not have fuel tablets. Can I use a bunsen burner in the lab under the fumehood?

Thank you in advance for your help, my student is really looking forward to trying this experiment out for the science fair.

[deleted-2131]

Hi SarahCrawford,

I checked the Boreal Science website, and I can't tell the difference between the granular and crystalline boric acid. I suspect the difference is the particle size, but I'm not sure. The customer service for Boreal Science hopefully knows what the difference is. I suggest using whichever has the finer particle size, although if they are both ~1 mm or smaller particles, it probably doesn't matter which size you use. Fig. 1 in the Procedure of the Project Idea shows the size of the grains used to test the project:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... #procedure

A bunsen burner under the fume hood should work fine for this project.