Does adding baking soda calm the fire

[NewPyro34]

I was making a smoke bomb and I heard adding baking soda can calm the fire down some. Is this true because it seems to get extremely hot when I light it so it would be nice if I could calm it down some. Thanks for your time.

[Seymour]

Yes. It decomposes absorbing energy (endothermic decomposition). It will lower the burn speed, ignitability, and flame temperature. A few percent will have quite an effect, and it won't take a lot to make it resistant to burning at all.

 

However there is another option (other than simply making it more fuel rich by increasing the sugar and lowering the nitrate), commonly referred to as the "legendary smoke mix", which is the addition of paraffin wax to the mixture. This has three useful characteristics. Besides slowing the combustion ( due to endothermic ablation, and shifting the fuel ballance to be more fuel rich) it waterproofs the mixture, lowering it's notorious hygroscopicity, and finally, so long as the ablated wax does not get burned up in the flame, it condenses, directly adding further to the white smoke cloud.

[oldmanbeefjerky]

hmmmm yeah i tried that a few times, and from experience i can tell you its probably called the legendary mix smoke mix because it takes some legendary skills to make it. getting the mix right is next to impossible, its always either too much, which ruins the batch, or too little, in which case it still burns almost exactly the same. My opinion is not to bother with it. Of course i have only tried mixing it in with a sugar/nitrate solid hardcandy situation. Recently i discovered if you add a small amount of fine and coarse charcoal you increase the burn speed, and the smoke mix produces very little flame at all. also it makes the whole thing really crumbly, and if granulated to a rocky sand consistency, and then dissolved parrafin were to be mixed in that way, perhaps you might get different results.

 

but whatever mix you have, stuffing it in the right container will fix everything, look at chlorate lactose mix for example. unconfined, it produces absolutely no smoke at all, with or without dye included, but put it into a hollow paper ball and you get all smoke, no flame, whatsmore its probably the densest smoke youll ever see.

 

whenever i made smokebombs i was always sure to wrap them in foil, and to shape them in certain ways, and they never failed.