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Emergency Preparedness Survival & First Aid Products & Supplies > Lights / Lanterns / Candles / LED > Glow Light Products, Glowlight Products, Light Sticks, Glowlight Sticks > What Makes Light Sticks Glow?


What Makes Light Sticks Glow?



What is a Lightstick and How Does it Operate?

Emergency safety lights for boating, camping or home use. No heat or sparks when lit. Completely waterproof.

Lightsticks or glowsticks are used for emergency preparedness, industrial safety, trick-or-treaters, divers, campers, and for decoration and fun! A lightstick is a plastic tube with a glass vial inside of it. In order to activate a lightstick, you bend the plastic stick, which breaks the glass vial. This allows the chemicals that were inside the glass to mix with the chemicals in the plastic tube. Once these substances contact each other, a reaction starts taking place. The reaction releases light, causing the stick to glow!

A Chemical Reaction Releases Energy

One form of energy is light. Some chemical reactions release energy; the chemical reaction in a lightstick releases energy in the form of light. The light produced by this chemical reaction is called chemiluminescence.

Although the light-producing reaction is not caused by heat and may not produce heat, the rate at which it occurs is affected by temperature. If you place a lightstick in a cold environment (like a freezer), then the chemical reaction will slow down. Less light will be released while the lightstick is cold, but the stick will last much longer. On the other hand, if you immerse a lightstick in hot water, the chemical reaction will speed up. The stick will glow much more brightly, but will wear out faster too.

What's Involved?

There are three components of a lightstick. There need to be two chemicals that interact to release energy and also a fluorescent dye to accept this energy and convert it into light. Although there is more than one recipe for a lightstick, a common commercial lightstick uses a solution of hydrogen peroxide that is kept separate from a solution of a phenyl oxalate ester together with a fluorescent dye. The color of the fluorescent dye is what determines the resulting color of the lightstick when the chemical solutions are mixed. The basic premise of the reaction is that the reaction between the two chemicals releases enough energy to excite the electrons in the fluorescent dye. This causes the electrons to jump to a higher energy level and then fall back down and release light.

Specifically, the chemical reaction works like this:

The hydrogen peroxide oxidizes the phenyl oxalate ester, to form phenol and an unstable peroxyacid ester. The unstable peroxyacid ester decomposes, resulting in phenol and a cyclic peroxy compound. The cyclic peroxy compound decomposes to carbon dioxide. This decomposition reaction releases the energy that excites the dye.

What Makes Light Sticks Glow?

If you've ever bent a light stick and stared in amazement as it produced light from two liquids then you know what makes chemiluminescence so interesting. Chemiluminescence is defined as the production of light energy from a chemical reaction without the use of heat or a flame.

On the molecular level, chemiluminescence can be explained as a reaction that produces atoms in an excited state. An excitation reaction that produces 40-70 kcal/mole of energy can be seen by the naked eye. These are the types of reactions that are used in making these amazing light sticks that many of us enjoyed as children. As is often the case, nature helped lead scientists to the discovery of these reactions. The firefly is the model of efficiency when it comes to producing light from chemical reactions. The firefly is able to reach an efficiency of 88% while synthetic reactions are only able to achieve a 23% efficiency at best.

Light sticks are activated by bending them and rupturing a capsule inside the stick. This allows the two liquids to mix and the reaction begins. The liquid that makes up the majority of the light stick is called the "oxalate." A typical oxalate solution is prepared by mixing bis(2,3,5-trichloro-6-carbonpentoxyphenyl) oxalate and dibutyl phthalate. This mixture is heated under nitrogen for an hour. Then another component called 9,10-bis(phenylethynyl) anthracene is added.

The light stick contains three parts oxalate and one part activator (contained in the capsule).




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