If water contains oxygen and there is fuel and heat, can a fire burn in water?

Posted by Keshav Jain on



You need three things for a fire, right? Fuel, oxygen, heat. So if hydrogen is flammable, and oxygen is in there, why doesn’t water burn when it gets hot?



The answer is somewhat counter-intuitive: water is already burnt.



Burning something is the process chemists, physicists and engineers (heck, even biologists…) call oxidation. Oxygen is a hungry little atom and just wants to react with and bind to everything. When this happens slowly it might be called rust:



But it’s the same thing underlying it all: oxygen is binding with everything and oxidising it.



So what’s this got to do with water? Water is what we call completely oxidised hydrogen. Burnt hydrogen. When you burn hydrogen it produces heat and water vapour.



So water can’t burn anymore because it’s already as burnt as it can get. Strange but true.



 



Credit : Quora



Picture Credit : Google