A lava lamp is one of those decorative lamps that are mostly used as night lights or plain simply decorative items for the bedroom or even the living room. Lava lamps are those tube shaped lights that contain, what looks like color filled goo inside transparent water. That is what we consider to be the inside of a lava lamp when we first see one and don’t exactly know what is inside it.
That colorful goo moves up and down in the liquid whilst changing its shape randomly from being a whole piece of goo into breaking down into several smaller pieces and then joining back randomly. The goo constantly forms random patterns and attract as well as please those that see it. So what exactly is inside a lava lamp? Or what exactly goes into a lava lamp, let’s take a look:
The liquid items:
A lava lamp’s main function revolves around the liquid items, which we called ‘goo’ in the above mentioned paragraph as well the transparent liquid in which the so called goo moves around in. To start off first, the transparent liquid can be of many types. It can simply be a mixture of water that is combined with isopropyl alcohol as well as mineral oil in the next phase. The material that is used as the liquid can also be made by several other ingredients such as benzyl alcohol or ethyl salicylate or even cinnamly alcohol.
The goo is basically a wax that can be formed through various ways. One of the ways through which this wax is formed is thorough the help and usage of carbon tetrachloride.
A container:
Although a container does not actually go into a lava lamp, it is the base in which various ingredients go into. The container is worth mentioning here since it is a pivotal part of a lava lamp. It is usually made up of glass.
There are many other chemicals that are added in the production of a lava lamp, but because there is no ONE way to produce a lava lamp, the ingredients that are being used in the formation of this lamp may differ. Some like to add sodium chloride to the mixture in order to adjust the gravity of the goo. Turpentine or other solvents that are used in paint can also be added to help the goo to combine it and aid the movement of it.
Therefore, what may go into a lava lamp may always be different depending on who is actually making it in the first place. As mentioned above, there are different ways to make a lava lamp and so different ingredients can be used to form the solution inside the lava lamp as well as the colorful wax that is seen moving in random motions.
Source:
http://www.enotes.com/how-products-encyclopedia/lava-lamp
