Tetrahedron of Fire

There are three basic theories that are used to describe the reaction known as fire. They are the fire triangle, the tetrahedron of fire, and the life cycle of fire. Of the three, the first is the oldest and best known, the second is accepted as more fully explaining the chemistry of fire, while the third is a more detailed version of the fire triangle. Each is briefly described below. 

Figure 16.1 The tetrahedron of fire. Fire is initiated by the upper three elements heat, oxygen, and fuel and is propagated and sustained by these three elements plus the additional element of an uninhibited chain reaction.

There are four building blocks—fuel, heat, air, and chemical reaction— that must be present for afire to occur. This can be pictured as a four-sided figure (referred to as a tetrahedron) —if one side is removed, the figure collapses. This is used to illustrate the point that if any one of these building blocks is removed, the fire is extinguished, which is the basis of fire attack. 

The Greek philosopher Pythagoras (circa 582-500 b.c.) and his students studied the regular polyhedra and introduced them into the Pythagorean cosmology as the symbols of the five elements the tetrahedron for fire, the cube for earth, the octahedron for air, the icosahedron for water, and the dodecahedron for ether (plate 7). Plato (427-347 B.c.) and the members of his school discussed the regular polyhedra with such vigor as to have caused them to be called the Platonic solids for over 2,300 years. 

The veom of fire ants (genus Solenopsis) contains 2,5-dialkylpiperidines. Typically these bear a methyl group at C-2 and a long alkyl or alkenyl chain at C-6. Some examples from S. saevissima are structures (114) and (115) where n=lO, 12 and 14 and (116) and (117) (where n=3 and 5 (J.G. MacConnell, M.S. Blum and H.M. Fales, Tetrahedron, 1971, 27, 1129). In addition some of the bases occur naturally as the A -nitroso derivatives. 

Plato is often given this accolade as he was the first to use this term for his description of the five basic shapes that he believed made up the entire universe tetrahedrons, icosahedrons, dodecahedrons, octahedrons, and cubes. He went on to ascribe each shape to a basic element, borrowing from Empedocles (see next question). The tetrahedron was fire icosahedron, water dodecahedron, aether octahedron, air cube, earth. While this association of basic geometriccd shapes to the nature of the Universe obviously didn t work out for him, Plato s ideas did lead Euclid to invent geometry. 

The second popular explanation of fire is the tetrahedron theory which is illustrated in Figure 1. This theory encompasses the three concepts in the fire triangle theory but adds a fourth side to the triangle, making it a pyramid, or tetrahedron this fourth side is called the chain reaction of burning. This theory states that when energy is applied to a fuel like a hydrocarbon, some of the carbon-to-carbon bonds break, leaving an unpaired electron attached to one of the... 

The tetrahedron is one of the perfect Platonic bodies, which are shown in Figure 4.3 and are known by the names tetrahedron, octahedron, cube, dodecahedron, and icosahedron. These bodies were thought by the Greeks to symbolize the fom elements and a fifth one called Quintessence. The tetrahedron symbolized Fire, the octahedron Air, the cube Earth, and the icosahedron Water. According to this philosophy, the... 

When an ignition source is brought into contact with a flammable gas or a mixture of gases, a combustion chemical reaction will occur at the point of introduction, provided an oxidizer is present, normally oxygen. The combustion components are commonly graphically referred to as a simple fire triangle, fire tetrahedron, or fire square. 

A The five elements of Aristotle cube or hexahedron (earth), tetrahedron (fire), octahedron (air), icosahedron (water), and dodecahedron (aether). 

A more scientific representation is a fire tetrahedron with the combustion chemical reaction considered as a fourth parameter or side of the tetrahedron. 

Fire Tetrahedron A four-sided, solid geometric figure Uiat resembles a pyramid, with one of the sides forming the base. Each side indicates one of the tour elements required to have fire. 

The roots of molecular beauty can be traced back to the Platonic tradition. To Plato, the most beautiful bodies in the whole realm of bodies were the tiny polyhedra, now deemed the Platonic solids, which he proposed comprise the universe the four elements - earth (cube), fire (tetrahedron), air (octahedron), water (icosahedron) - and the ether (dodecahedron) (Fig. 1). Joachim Schummer, who has written [9] extensively on chemical aesthetics, writes ... 

The involvement of qrmmetry in chemistry has a long history in 640 B.O. the Society of Pythagoras held that earth had been produced from the reguliu hexahedron or cube, fire from the r ular tetrahedron, air fiom the regular octahedron, water from the regular icosahedron, and the heavenly sphere from the regular dodecahedron. Today, the chemist intuitively uses symmetry every time he recognizes which atoms in a molecule are equivalent, for example in pyrene it is easy... 

The five fundamental solids, the tetrahedron, the octahedron, the icosahedron and the dodecahedron were known to the Ancient Greeks. Constructions based on isosceles triangles are described for the first four by Plato in his Dialogue Timaeus, where he associated them with fire, earth, air, water and noted the existence of the fifth, the dodecahedron, standing for the Universe as a whole. These five objects are now known as the Platonic solids — defined as the convex polyhedra because they exhibit equivalent convex regular polygonal faces. 

Trichlorosilane DPR is known to produce shock-sensitive hydrolysis products. Because these popping gels contain all four necessary elements of the fire tetrahedron, fuel, oxidizer, sustainable reaction, and ignition source, they pose a significant hazard, particularly in classified areas or wherever flammable atmospheres may exist. 

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