Kind: captions
Language: en
what is a candle flame really made of
I'm at the palace of Discovery in Paris
to do an experiment that beautifully
demonstrates the
answer okay so we're turning on electric
field here you can see that the flame is
spreading
out you see
uh
that's very cute it's like a
butterfly and you can see that the flame
has two separate pieces to it now one is
going towards the negative plate and
those would be the positive ions and the
negative ions will be going towards the
positively charged plate so we see the
flame kind of flattening out but if that
didn't convince you that a flame
contains ions then check out part two of
our experiment where we compare the
conductivity of a flame to the
conductivity of air which is normally a
pretty good insulator it requires about
10,000 volts to break down a centimeter
of air so right now uh this plate is at
about 10,000 volts you see that the
spark is only
little but if I put it around the flame
we'll see if we can get a bigger spark
to
happen look at that
[Applause]
yeah because the flame has those ions in
it it means that we can break down a
greater distance of air because the
there's greater
conductivity
yeah that's awesome you love doing this
right yeah a strong enough electric
field can actually extinguish the flame
but watch carefully what happens when
the flame goes
out wait wait
wait
just like in the flame the opposite
charges in the Smoke are pulled in
opposite directions now while some may
argue that a flame is not truly a plasma
because it's not hot enough and it
doesn't have a high enough density of
ions one thing is for sure it does
contain ions which have important
electrical properties which can be
demonstrated if you have a strong enough
electric field we
go now is the perfect time you see that
it's just that easy maybe we should have
a look at that in slow motion excite the
Adams and
M yeah