– How exactly does water put out a fire? Is it a smothering thing, or a chemical reaction?
In: Chemistry
In a fire the carbon and oxygen molecules are all really really excited and bumping into each other, and combining into CO2, which makes more bumping, in turn setting off more molecules bumping and clicking together.
Water comes in and ruins the party. So much energy is spent breaking the water droplets apart into steam, it robs the other molecules of their bumping and jittering and now they can’t click together to make CO2 and no more chain reaction, no more fire.
Interestingly, if we are talking about wood burning, where does wood come from? Where does it’s MASS come from?
Does it grow out of the ground? Does the tree get its mass from material pulled up by roots? No. Trees grow out of the air. They take up CO2, then photosynthesis uses a photon from the sun to knock the C loose from the O2. The tree spits out the useless waste product (oxygen) and then strings the carbon into chains (along with some oxygen and hydrogen) to make cellulose (wood)
So when you burn wood, you are reversing the chemical reaction and releasing the same amount of energy that went in to breaking the CO2 in the first place, chiefly, the photons, as heat and light. So, in a way, wood is *stored sunlight*.
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