Yeah, it is interesting and it seems there are two disparate considerations; frictional heating and pyrophoric combustion.
The proverbial flint and steel fire starting thing is an excellent example. When you think about it, well, at least when I think about it, the copious volume of sparks produced by striking flint on steel doesn’t quite make sense because so little work is done in relation to the voluminous amount of sparks produced. That quick strike of flint and steel can’t possibly cause enough mechanically induced frictional heating to produce such a glowing red hot shower of sparks.
I just did a quick search and of course the flint/steel stuff is all over Internet land.
Here you can watch the particles combust and burn in the air. Pretty cool. It starts about 1:20 into the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO9g1_BTz0o
http://survivaltopics.com/flint-and-stee...he-sparks/
The proverbial flint and steel fire starting thing is an excellent example. When you think about it, well, at least when I think about it, the copious volume of sparks produced by striking flint on steel doesn’t quite make sense because so little work is done in relation to the voluminous amount of sparks produced. That quick strike of flint and steel can’t possibly cause enough mechanically induced frictional heating to produce such a glowing red hot shower of sparks.
I just did a quick search and of course the flint/steel stuff is all over Internet land.
Here you can watch the particles combust and burn in the air. Pretty cool. It starts about 1:20 into the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO9g1_BTz0o
http://survivaltopics.com/flint-and-stee...he-sparks/