5) You bought a set of lawn chairs at Wally Land for your presidential election

Question

5) You bought a set of lawn chairs at Wally Land for your presidential election party. These are those painted aluminum chairs with the woven Nylon seats and backs. Two thirds of the chairs were red and one third were purple (blue really, but the political angle works better with purple).   You set them out on your deck in Casa Grande in January and in October, while you were out shooting at some endangered species flying over your property, you noticed that the red chairs were now gray in color. The Blue ones still looked new, dangitall. Explain why the red chairs faded in color, yet the blue ones did not. And it had nothing to do with politics ?

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Answer the question in clear words and in very good description!!! Please type your answer. Thanks

Explanation / Answer

Dyes and pigments work by absorbing certain wavelengths of light and reflecting or transmitting the rest. When a dye molecule absorbs a photon, an electron is excited to a higher energy state. Most of the time (neglecting fluorescence), the molecule de-excites by giving off heat and returns to the ground state intact. However, because the excited state is a high energy state, it has the potential to undergo a chemical reaction, breaking a covalent bond or otherwise irreversibly reacting with another molecule. This changes the electronic structure of the molecule which changes its absorption properties: e.g. many dyes that absorb visible light have large systems of conjugated double bonds and if these are broken, the absorbance can shift to much shorter wavelengths. How likely this kind of destructive chemistry is depends on the nature of the dye. Organic dyes tend to be more susceptible to photobleaching than the blue colour.

Therefore red paint can often degrade faster because it absorbs higher energy (shorter wavelength) light. The more energy that is available, the more likely it is that reactions will occur.

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