Fun with Flames

11/9/12

Today was my first meeting with Heather and Daniele! After surviving my short journey through the RPI campus to the lab, I talked with Heather, Daniele, Veronica and Megan about my interests in Earth science. Heather showed me calcite, a crystal that makes up rocks such as limestone. Calcite has optical properties, so Heather wrote my name on a piece of paper. When Heather held up the calcite to the paper, it looked like my name had been written twice! After looking at the calcite, Daniele showed me how to make sealed tubes in which small reactions could take place for an experiment. First, we took hollow tubes of silicon glass. Other types of glass can be used, but according to Daniele, they get a little bubbly and harder to work with since they heat up more quickly than silicon. It took a few tries, but I was finally able to get the right ratio of oxygen and gas to get an extra hot blue flame from the Bunsen burner. To create my reaction chamber, first I had to seal one end of the hollow tube. I donned a pair of stylish clunky glasses to protect my eyes from the flame and slowly rotated the tube around the flame until the glass from the edges eventually came together to form a dome. Then, I attached the other end of the tube to a machine that would make the inside of the tube a vacuum, because if this was to be used in an experiment, we wouldn't want our reactants interacting with the air within the tube. After waiting for the machine to create the right conditions in the tube, I turned on the Bunsen burner and after a few more tries, got that blue flame of success. I then held the middle of the tube up to the flame while the top of the tube was still attached to the machine, thereby preserving the vacuum. As the tube heated up, I slowly pulled it downward until I pulled the melty glass away from the top of the tube.  My work was done and I had to run back to school in order to make it to the open house on time. Daniele and Heather were nice enough to offer to let me keep my tube (much to the delight of my English class which I lectured later on the steps to creating such a tube) as a testament to my hour of determined work. Even though I had a shorter session, I still had a lot of fun (how could I not playing with fire?) and can't wait for my next meeting on Friday.