Mumbles Posted Thursday at 08:16 PM Posted Thursday at 08:16 PM The strobing looks semi-regular to me, which tends to be a sign of AP based strobes vs. barium nitrate based strobes. Maybe take a prototypical green AP strobe, and start blending in copper oxide in place of barium sulfate. Adding blue tints to strobes tends to be a little touchy, as the logical choice of copper sulfate is corrosive to most metals. There are also some esoteric strobe formulas based on guanidine nitrate, but my experience with them is that the strobe performance tends to be pretty underwhelming and irregular. Completely inconsistent with that initial theory, another thought might be something along the formulas presented here, but with copper oxide in place of bismuth trioxide?
DavidF Posted Thursday at 09:43 PM Author Posted Thursday at 09:43 PM Thanks for the link Mumbles. I should have mentioned that he lists the formula in the video comments, which is: 44- Ammonium perchlorate 23- MgAl, mesh not specified 17- Barium nitrate 11- Black copper oxide 5- Dextrin It just seemed really vivid color to me, and I thought these were near impossible to make. I'd be happy with those ones.
Carbon796 Posted Thursday at 11:48 PM Posted Thursday at 11:48 PM I made some aqua strobes once ( like more than a decade ago . . . ) AP/BN/GN based. They did strobe and they were aqua. I can remember being impressed with them. Probably mostly just because they actually worked. But never went back to revisit them. 1
rocketboy242 Posted 17 hours ago Posted 17 hours ago amazing color!! What would you use as the binding solvent in that formula?
DavidF Posted 13 hours ago Author Posted 13 hours ago One thing I completely missed about this formula- the incompatibility between ammonium perchlorate and a nitrate. I'm no chemist, but everybody knows you can't use a standard BP containing prime for AP stars, due to the formation of hygroscopic ammonium nitrate, which would make the stars unignitable. But this is barium nitrate not potassium nitrate. Something in the back of my mind remembers that the relative solubilities of the potential reactants has a lot to do with whether the double displacement reaction will proceed. I wonder if this is a case where this particular (barium) nitrate is not problematic, like potassium nitrate would be? Maybe Mumbles or some other chemistry savvy member knows the answer? They mention it in the video comments and he says he had them in a bag for 3 months with no issues. Also, the mesh of magnalium used was "50".
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