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What is luminous and non luminous flames?
luminous flame is the flame when you have not opened the air hole of your Bunsen burner. it moves around a lot. it looks a bit like the flame you find on candles. only it's a …lot bigger. non-luminous flame is the flame when you have opened the air holes of your Bunsen burner. it's really steady, coloured blue only with no orange around it. sometimes though, you'll see small orange flames going up and disappears. ---------------------------------------------- Luminous: emitting light A luminous flame is created from an exothermic reaction (normally oxidisation) between that also emits visible light (EM radiation of wavelength 390[violet light]-750nm[red light]). A non-luminous flame is one that doesn't (EM radiation of wavelength750nm) Basically, if a reaction is making lots of heat (your normal, yellow Bunsen burner flame is at about 700^C) and you can see it, it's luminous. If you can't see it (and the heat is there) then it's non-luminous) [The yellow Bunsen burner flame is from the oxidisation of carbon molecules left over from the methane-oxygen reaction. The blue one is too, it's just happening faster so the wavelength decreases - ask your local physics teacher or put 100nm into Wikipedia search] (MORE)