Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

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.

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.