Question: how do fireworks work

Shikha Sharma answered on 17 Nov 2014:

Hi 624bera39,
Firework consists of either black powder/gunpowder or flash powder. It’s a mixture of charcoal/alumina, sulfur, and potassium nitrate, or smokeless powder such as cellulose nitrate. Then it requires one substance that gives off bright, colorful light when heated e.g. sodium in table salt. If you sprinkle salt into a flame, an orange color appears. The orange color flame is an outcome of electrons in sodium ions absorbing energy and moving up to higher energy levels and then falling back to their ground state, emitting specific amounts of energy that correspond to colors of light. Different substances produce different colors e.g., salts of copper produce green and blue flames, compounds of strontium produce brilliant red colors. So basically fireworks consist of a source of energy such as a mixture of a fuel and an oxidizing agent that react to produce high temperatures and some substance that will emit brightly colored light.

We have a festival in India, Diwali-festival of lights. You should visit India during that time…the firework is really amazing 🙂 There are different type of fireworks like aerial fireworks usually are of two types, aerial shells fired from tubes and the traditional skyrocket.
Rockets are generally prepared using cardboard tubes filled with a mixture of fuel and oxidizer in proportions that allow continuous burning rather than explosion. Expulsion of gases from the tube propels it skyward whereas rockets often contain explosive charges to explode after the propellant charge burns out; the composition of the explosive charge determines the colors produced.