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Jeff,
Am I understanding correctly that the spark appears to jump to the flame and terminate there?
The charge must go somewhere. Perhaps the ionization caused by the flame simply allows the charges heading away from the flame to spread out in all directions. They wouldn't need to make a spark to travel away from the flame.
I'll have to try this.
Paul
On Apr 12, 2012, at 10:53 PM, Jeff Bigler wrote:
I was demonstrating an induction coil in one of my physics classes
today. One of my students asked whether the arcing current could light
a match. I didn't know the answer, so i taped a match to a meter stick
and tried it. Nothing happened.
At that point, because I now had a match on the end of a meter stick, I
thought it might be fun to see whether the current affected the flame.
So I lit the match and held the flame (on the end of the meter stick)
near the arc. When I did this, the arc jumped into the flame.
In retrospect, this makes sense. I believe this must occur because the
flame is a redox (electron transfer) reaction, and the reaction
components were acting as a source and/or sink for the electrons arcing
between the electrodes of the induction coil.
I thought this was a physics/chemistry connection that was interesting
enough to be worth sharing.
--
Jeff Bigler
"Magic" is what we call Science before we understand it.
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