Colorator

Colorator

WTF is a Colorator?

The small idea behind a colorator is a container filled with granular salts. A stainless steel screen holds the granules in place while acohol is pumped through the container. The salts then disolve in the alcohol.

The reasoning is that it might be possible to build these cheaply (ha) and use them to add colorants to alchol just before it is pumped into a flame cannon. This is good because salts are corrosive. If the fuel tank plumbing and pump are not exposed to the salts then they can be made of common materials like steel, brass and such and are therefor much cheaper.

Ordered an inline strainer. Will see if this can be turned into something that will allow me to disolve salts in alcohol.

Another though is to use a small tank of water and Strontium Chloride and pump it into the flow just before the alcohol enters the launch system. The base idea is that SrCl maybe much more soluable in water than alcohol. Enough so that I can add 25 grams of the stuff in water and still have a flamable mixture of methonol + water + SrCl. For this I need solubility data for SrCl.

Dah Source! http://wwwchem.csustan.edu/chem1112/1112unk.pdf

Calcium Chloride    60g/100ml    (0.6)  
Lithium Chloride    64g/100ml    (0.64)
Potasium Chloride   35g/100ml    (0.35) 
Sodium Chloride    209g/100ml    (2.09) 
Strontium Chloride 106g/100ml    (1.06)

Copper Acetate      7.2 g/100ml  (0.07)
Boric Acid          4.8 g/100ml  (0.05)(0.2 hot)

I’ve read that adding 50grams of colorant per gallon (3785ml) of alcohol is a good rule of thumb. In that case the ratio of colorant to alchol is (0.013).

Waving my hands. Any colorant that has a solubility of more than 13.0g/100ml in water can be used in a aqueous solution injection system.

That tends to rule out Boric Acid, which is very sad!

Possible way around

However ethyl borate is a liquid that will disolve in methyl alcohol. It’s nominally formed by adding boric acid to ethyl alcohol.

Ehyl borate decomposes in water to form ethyl alcohol and boric acid. However it’s probably stable in ethyl and methyl alcohol.

Methyl Borate (CH3O)3B Boric Acid B(OH)3

B(OH3) + (3)CH3-OH => (CH3O)3B + 3(H2O)

Note the three H2O molecules.

An asumption that I have based on experience is that boric acid disolves in methonol really well producing a really nice green flame not the yellow green you get in denatured alcohol. It very well may be that one can use a solution of boric acid and methonol as a colorant.

Possible test case.

Use Betsy as the test rig.
Use the yamada diapram pump with CO2 to pump methonol into Betsy. Add a manifold to betsy that allows one to inject a methonol+boric acid mixture into the alcohol line. The Alcohol and colorant would be mixed after the check valves.

The colorant can be stored in the stainless steel pressure dispencing vessel I bought off ebay.

If this works the easy solution to the multicolor problem is to buy two or three more pressure dispencing vessels one each for SrCl + Water, CaCl + Water, and Methyl Borate + Methonol.

A plastic container plus pump could also be used to add CuCl or Copper Acetate as well, producing a blue green flame.