“Too much oxygen things go boom” It means Oxygen can be used as fuel like a gas stove, or lighters, or that some mundane things like clothes/footwear can ignite from friction in a concentrated oxygen room?
In: Chemistry
Fire is fuel reacting with oxygen. The fuel molecules combine with the oxygen molecules in a reaction that releases heat. For such a reaction to take place, an oxygen molecule needs to bump into a fuel molecule, and the reaction also needs a little bit of heat to get going. After that initial heat, the fire can keep itself going by producing more heat with each reaction. But that does mean you need the reactions to keep happening. It’s not enough to get one fuel molecule to react with one oxygen molecule. If there aren’t other fuel and oxygen molecules nearby, the heat from that initial reaction just spreads out into nothing. So to keep a fire going, you have to supply fuel and oxygen. The more you have of each, the easier it is for the fire to keep going and even grow.
When a fire grows very quickly, that’s called an explosion. Each fire reaction produces hot gas (mostly steam and CO2). Many fire reactions happening at the same time creates a lot of hot gas. That hot gas is bigger in volume than the fuel and the oxygen were. It needs more room than the fuel and oxygen did. So it expands outwards with great force and speed. “Boom”, as it were.
Usually fire gets its oxygen from the air in the atmosphere. This air contains only about 20% oxygen, while the rest is mostly nitrogen. For some fuels, this means that they cannot explode. The 20% just isn’t enough to get enough fuel and oxygen molecules bumping into each other to spread the fire quickly enough. But with more oxygen, you get more fuel-oxygen collisions. Now suddenly the same fuel can burn much faster and create an explosion. And fuels that were already explosive only get explosive-er.
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