What decides the color of a flame?

Question

Flame color can in part be decided by metal emission spectrums, that I know. But supposedly, the color could also be affected by the heat of the combustion, black body radiation. I’m wondering how these two come in to play and which ones matter. When burning normal candles the flame is usually yellow; when burning denatured alcohol the flame is blue (just had a fondue, that’s how I came up with the question); normal fires are usually a little orange. My question is: is this purely down to black body radiation, metals or a mix of both?

Anusha · Answer

It depends upon many conditions like amount of oxygen available in atmosphere. In practical colour is also determined by black body effect for example when a perfectly black body is heated up at high temperature it turns blue in colour and at low temperature it shows shades of red. For bodies that are not black body like various metals it is associated with excitation of electrons, on being heated up the electrons in metals attain an excited state and while coming to ground state the release energy in form of light of various wavelengths like in chemistry we study flame color imparted by various metals so it different depending upon the object

Answered by Anusha on August 11, 2021

What decides the color of a flame?

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