Story Published:
Jun 1, 2009 at 7:00 AM CDT
Story Updated:
Jun 1, 2009 at 12:37 PM CDT
Today's science question: What is in a Cheeto that allows it to burn?
There is energy in everything. One way to measure that is with the unit of calories. (A calorie is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one gram of water 1oC). And don't confuse it with the kind of calorie you try to keep from reaching your waistline. A more common measure of energy is the Joule, which we use to measure instability in the StormTeam weather center.
Cheetos have energy, or calories. And Cheetos will burn. The oil contained in the ingredients contain the energy needed for combustion. And just so you know, they smell awful. So don't try it at home.
But what if we wanted to make a Cheeto become white-hot... rather than a crispy-critter black like what you see in the video?
A fire requires 3 things: heat, fuel and oxygen. Increasing one of those might do the trick.
If we increase our fuel, that's only increasing the cheetos. That's not going to do anything useful.
If we increase the heat, that will have a minute difference. But, if we increase our oxygen... that's where the fun begins.
Mad Scientist Kent Williams brought along some potassium chlorate, and put it into the test tube. He heated it until we changed the state of matter from a solid to liquid, which yielded a practically pure oxygen environment.
We see this practically applied in real-life with welding torches powered by pure oxygen... and the space shuttle external tank using a mixture of liquid hydrogen and helium to blast the orbiter into space.
As we added a Cheetoh to the nearly pure oxygen environment (which was being heated by our torch)... LIFTOFF. You'll see the difference in the video. No question about what added ingredient made that turn white-hot like a rocket.
Williams said, "That is telling us that cheetos have some heat energy, but at the same time anything in the oxygen environment... anything is going to combust and burn a lot faster and a lot hotter."
So the main ingredients for fire were:
heat from the fire,
the fuel from the Cheetoh
but most importantly extra oxygen to make the fire white-hot.
If you'd like to learn more about why Cheetos burn, or have fun learning the ways of mad scientists... check out the summer camp offerings here:
If you have a science question,
send Dave an email
and we'll try to answer it during our next Mad Science Monday.
