The production of less harmful and less toxic sparklers in an experiment for school students-Reference-Cited by-同舟云学术

The production of less harmful and less toxic sparklers in an experiment for school students

Published:2021-02-24 Issue:3 Volume:3 Page:285-294
ISSN:2569-3263
Container-title:Chemistry Teacher International
language:en
Short-container-title:

Author:

Scheid Michael¹²^ORCID,Rusan Magdalena¹^ORCID,Klapötke Thomas M.¹^ORCID,Schwarzer Stefan²^ORCID

Affiliation:

1. Department of Chemistry , Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München , Butenandtstraße 5-13 , 81377 München , Germany

2. Chemistry Education , Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen , Auf der Morgenstelle 18 , 72076 Tübingen , Germany

Abstract

Abstract In this article, a new and simple way of producing sparklers is presented as a school experiment. These sparklers are more environmentally friendly and less health threatening than sparklers produced with existing preparation methods. The problem of conventional sparklers is the toxicity of barium nitrate, which is used as the oxidizer. The substitution of this oxidizer with strontium nitrate and also the reduction of the weight proportion makes the new mixture less dangerous and less toxic. Various tests for the categorization of high-energetic materials show that the newly developed sparklers are not classified as explosives. Furthermore, the tests demonstrate that the newly developed sparklers are not as dangerous as commercial sparklers. Due to their lower health risk, these new sparklers are well suited for use in school education. In addition, expenditure for this experiment is low and integrating it into the upper secondary level curriculum is easy. Sparklers are an impressive example of redox reactions from everyday life. The experiment is a best-practice application for chemistry education, incorporating current results of chemistry research.

Publisher

Walter de Gruyter GmbH

Subject

General Earth and Planetary Sciences,General Environmental Science

Link

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/cti-2020-0012/pdf

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