Tuesday, May 31, 2011

How Does a Green Flame Torch Lighter Work?

By Wendy Mallikarjunan


Some butane lighter models burn with a green flame. These are usually sold as novelties, though some cigar smokers like them because they believe that the flame is cooler and, therefore, safer for lighting a cigar. This may or may not be true, depending upon the lighter that's being discussed. The way it works involves the chemistry of burning.

To produce a green flame, you usually burn copper in one way or another. Sometimes, the copper is part of an accelerant that is added to the coils on the lighter. In other cases, there may actually be physical copper present in the burners that heats up and gives off the colored flames. Even though people associate copper with its reddish hue, the meal turns green when it burns and when it rusts.

If you have a butane torch that gives off a green flame, there is generally some sort of an accelerant on the coil that produces this effect. It usually takes a second or two for it to kick in. Before the accelerant gets hot enough to start burning, the flame will be blue. This is not always the case, however.

The flame will start out blue and, within a second or two, it will gradually turn green. Most often, there is copper somewhere in the coil that makes this happen. As the copper gets hotter, it starts to oxidize and turns green. The flame color can be quite brilliant, though there is no other material except for butane fueling it. The copper will usually burn off after a while, so these flame effects do not last forever.

On a very good lighter, you may find that the green color holds up for a long time. There are cheaper, novelty lighters that also burn in different colors, but the devices that make them do so usually do not hold up for long. If you want a brilliant green flame that will keep on producing for a long time, get an expensive lighter. A cigar lighter will usually be made at a high enough level of quality to ensure that you can enjoy this effect for a long time to come. Never add anything to a lighter yourself to make this effect, however, as it can cause a real hazard by ruining the mechanism or by introducing impurities into the lighter's flame itself and, thus, into your smoke.




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