How Fireworks Work

★ wanayoo — archive 1999 http://howstuffworks.com/fireworks.htm

Sponsored by

How Fireworks Work
by Marshall Brain

If you have ever been to an aerial fireworks show at an amusement park, baseball game, 4th of July celebration or on New Year's Eve, then you know that fireworks have a special and beautiful magic all their own - a good show is absolutely amazing! Have you ever wondered how this magic works? What is launched into the sky to make these beautiful displays? In this edition of How Stuff Works you will learn all about aerial fireworks so you will completely understand how they work!

Click on this image to see a short fireworks display! (1.5 mb)

The Basic Components
Just about everyone in the U.S. has some personal experience with fireworks, either from 4th of July or New Year's Eve celebrations. For example, you have probably seen both sparklers and fire crackers. It turns out that if you understand these two pyrotechnic devices, then you are well on your way to understanding aerial fireworks! The sparkler demonstrates how to get bright, sparkling light from a firework and the fire cracker shows how to create an explosion.

Fire crackers have been around for hundreds of years. They consist of black powder (also known as gun powder) in a tight paper tube with a fuse to light the powder. Black powder is discussed briefly on the HSW page entitled How Rockets Work and contains charcoal, sulphur and potassium nitrate. A composition used in a fire cracker might have aluminum instead of or in addition to charcoal in order to brighten the explosion.

Sparklers are very different from firecrackers. A sparkler burns over a long period of time (up to a minute) and produces extremely bright and showery light. Sparklers are often referred to as "snowball sparklers" because of the ball of sparks that surrounds the burning portion of the sparkler. If you look at Patent #3,862,865: Sparkler composition you can see that a sparkler consists of several different compounds:

A fuel
An oxidizer
Iron or steel powder
A binder

The oxidizer is aluminum perchlorate or barium nitrate plus aluminum perchlorate (see Question 258 for a discussion of oxidizers). The fuel is charcoal and sulphur, as in black powder. The binder can be sugar or starch. Mixed with water these chemicals form a slurry that can be coated on a wire (by dipping) or poured into a tube. Once it dries you have a sparkler. When you light it, the sprarkler burns from one end to the other (like a cirgarette) -- the fuel and oxidizer are proportioned along with the other chemicals in a sparkler so that it burns slowly rather than exploding like a firecracker.

It is very common for fireworks to contain aluminum, iron, steel, zinc or magnesium dust in order to create bright, shimmering sparks. The metal flakes heat up until they are incandescent and shine brightly, or they actually burn at a high enough temperature. There is also a variety of chemicals that can be added to create colors. See Light and colors for a good explanation of the chemistry and physics of color in fireworks.

Aerial Fireworks
An aerial firework is normally formed as a shell that consists of four parts:

A container - ususally pasted paper and string formed into a cylinder
Stars - spheres, cubes or cylinders of a sparkler-like composition
A bursting charge - a firecracker-like charge at the center of the shell
A fuse - provides a time delay so the shell explodes at the right altitude.

The shell is lauched form a mortar tube. The tube might be a short steel pipe with a lifting charge of black powder that explodes in the tube to launch the shell. When the bursting charge fires to launch the shell, it lights the shell's fuse. The shell's fuse will burn while the shell rises to its correct altitude, and then the fuse ignites the contents of the shell so it explodes.

A simple shell used in an aerial fireworks display.
The blue balls are the stars, and the grey is black powder. The
powder is packed into the center tube, which is the bursting charge.
It is also sprinkled between the stars to help ignite them.

Simple shells consist of a paper tube filled with stars and black powder. Stars come in all shapes and sizes (several of the links below list dozens of recipes for different types of stars), but you can imagine a simple star as somthing like sparkler compound formed into a ball the size of a pea or a dime. The stars are poured into the tube and then surrounded by black powder. When the fuse burns into the shell it ignites the black powder, causing the shell to explode. The explosion ignites the outside of the stars which begin to burn with bright showers of sparks. Since the explosion throws the stars in all directions, you get the huge sphere of sparkling light that is familiar at all fireworks displays!

More complicated shells burst in two or three phases. They can also contain stars of different colors and compositions to create softer or brighter light, more or less sparks, etc. Some shells contain explosives designed to crackle in the sky, or whistles that explode outward with the stars.

If you would like to learn the details of constructing fireworks, the links below (along with the patent database) contain huge amounts of useful information.

Links

Zambelli Fireworks - lots of pictures and video
Aerial Fireworks - SciAm pictorial
Practical pyrotechnics - nice online guide. Contains instructions on making shells and also a variety of recipes for stars, etc.
Pyrotechnics Web Book - nice online guide
Pyrotechnics FAQ
Patent #5,627,338 - a fascinating fireworks patent assigned to Disney (words start on page 19)
Patent #3,862,865: Sparkler composition - learn about the chemistry of a sparkler
Light and colors - the chemistry of color in fireworks
Skylighter, Inc. - A Supermarket for Pyrotechnics Professionals & Fireworks Making
Pyrotechnics Guild International
Journal of Pyrotechnics
Patriotic Fireworks