What is fire?
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$5 Answers
Fire is NOT an element. This is what they believed in the ancient Greek era. An element is a substance and therefore fire cannot be an element as it is made up of several substances.
Fire is classified as the fourth and not commonly known form of matter, plasma. This is the term given to something which is ionized gas.
cjd
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
According to Wiki:
A chemical reaction involving the bonding of oxygen with carbon or other fuel.
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
Watching a flame dance through the air, you might conclude that fire's a gas, like oxygen or carbon dioxide. It's not. Fire can burn fuel that's a gas, or a liquid, or even a solid – as in the case of glowing charcoal. But the fire itself isn't any of these things. In fact, fire isn't anything at all. It's not its own type of matter; it's something that matter can do. Fire is a chemical reaction.
A fire needs oxygen and some kind of fuel. This fuel – whether it's candle wax, wood, or gasoline – usually contains big molecules that have carbon atoms inside them. You can think of these molecules as little containers of energy. When they're allowed to combine with oxygen, this energy is released as heat and light.
Fire is a rapid chemical reaction known as oxidation. Inside a fire, oxygen molecules break bigger molecules apart into carbon dioxide and water vapor. All the heat and light of a fire comes from big, carbon-based molecules combining with oxygen.
So what is fire? It's not the fuel or the oxygen or the heat or the light. Fire is what happens between all these things!
The Fire Tetrahedron
There are four elements that maintain the combustion process, and the absence of any one of them will prevent a fire. The removal of these elements is the job of firefighters.
* The reducing agent (fuel) may be removed from the site of a fire to curb its spread. In forestry, controlled burns are used to keep the available fuel supply low, so that intense fires do not occur. Sometimes you can stop the flow of a liquid or gas fuel. In the case of a burning pipeline, the flow of fuel can simply be turned off.
* An oxidizer (usually oxygen) is needed to react with the fuel. Sand, foam, or gases which do not support combustion (such as carbon dioxide) may be used to stop the flow of oxygen to a fire (smother the flames). In particularly violent fires, such as those of the Kuwaiti oil wells during the Gulf War, explosions may be used instead.
* Heat is what allows liquid fuels to be vaporized, and solid fuels to undergo pyrolysis. Solids and liquids do not burn directly, they must first be converted into a gas through pyrolysis or vaporization. Removal of enough heat prevents fuels from burning. Water is uniquely effective at removing heat due to its high specific heat capacity.
* The chemical chain reaction is what perpetuates combustion; compounds such as halon extinguishing agents cause the chain reaction to be broken. The precise mechanism is not known, but it is thought that the halogen radicals end the reactions that support combustion.
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
several years of chemistry classes
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
Fire is usually not hot enough for burning gases to become ionized, and turn into plasma.