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In the promotional film, wing-mounted flying players draw dynamic colorful clouds with cool and gorgeous tail smoke, and the bright smoke pouring out from the riding players’ masks is domineering, which greatly set off the happy atmosphere of a free and crazy game.

Just imagine, without these colored smoke, those winged pilots in the sky and riding players on the vast land are just a group of fast-moving ants in our eyes.

Exhaust smoke

After the widespread application of aircraft, people found that aircraft sometimes left a long “tail” in the place they passed with the movement in flight, so they vividly called this phenomenon “smoking”.

The earliest smoke phenomenon was actually caused by the exhaust gas from aircraft.

First, the exhaust gas temperature is high. When it flies above 8000 meters and the ambient temperature is between – 41 ℃ and – 60 ℃, the water vapor in the air and the exhaust gas will condense into countless small water droplets or small ice crystals, which usually looks like a white piece of smoke to the naked eye.

Because its formation conditions are unstable, we often see this smoke intermittently, and more in winter.

Second, in low altitude, although the temperature is not enough to condense water vapor, the heat of aircraft exhaust evaporates the surrounding water vapor, so smoke can sometimes be seen in the clouds in low altitudes.

This principle sometimes causes water vapor to rise due to heating, and finally forms a wider and longer wake kilometers away from the aircraft.

Air convection smoke

With the wide application of jet aircraft, smoking is more common.

Due to the different pressure difference between the upper and lower wings of a jet aircraft or the rotation of the propeller, an air vortex with low central pressure will be generated at the end of the wing, which makes the surrounding water vapor condense here to form smoke.

This kind of smoke is generally two, more conspicuous and more ornamental.

The above are naturally occurring smoking phenomena, and man-made smoking is left by the “urination” of the aircraft in addition to smoking agents.

Aviation smoke oil

Just kidding, the so-called “urination” of the aircraft is actually the air-fuel discharge operation of the aircraft.

Sometimes, the aircraft needs to reduce weight during flight to ensure safe landing. At this time, the aircraft will release the fuel in the form of small droplets after pressurizing and crushing through the special release port.

This is also to minimize the pollution to the air environment. Of course, what finally appears in front of people is white smoke. (so you’d better go to the bathroom before swimming)

After seeing all kinds of aircraft smoke, especially the development of science and technology, which enables aircraft to make rich flight movements, emotional humans thought of attaching color to these smoke, which not only increases the appreciation of flight performance, but also realizes the human epic of “painting in the sky”?

Sure enough, these artistic visions should finally be realized by science students, and the research on smoking agents began.

The emergence of aircraft smoking

At the beginning, due to the immature technology, people found sulfuric anhydride as the solvent of smoking agent in many existing preparations.

Although sulfuric acid anhydride will fog rapidly due to its water absorption and good viewing effect, the sulfuric acid fog produced by sulfuric acid anhydride will cause serious damage to the environment and even the aircraft fuselage.

Even when applied to flight performances, toxic colored metal compounds are usually used as the main colorants of smoke pulling agents for performance effects.