Bad experience with tongue bite

[jpmcwjr]

Tongue burn (heat burn): It happens when you smoke too fast. The combustion in the chamber causes more water to evaporate due to hotter temperature and that steam burns the tongue, roof of the mouth, cheeks, etc. Some tobacco types tend to easily get hotter than other types. Almost any type of tobacco can cause heat burn if the limits are pushed.

Bad things happen from smoking too fast or too wet, or igniting the tobacco with a blow torch. BUT, it's unlikely that it's the temperature of the smoke reaching the mouth that does it. Above, bprivate links to an article that has a take on that. THIS is the LINK to that article.

 

[harveymushman]

Dang, A LOT of good advice in this thread...

 

[bprivateaerdric]

Dang, A LOT of good advice in this thread...

There really is, and I thank every one!
I think after all is said and done, I smoked too many pipes in one day, I smoked at least two of them way too hot, I might need to dry my tobacco because the general humidity here is very high, and I need to let my mouth heal some more. I just got in the Biotene and had to spit it out and wash my mouth out with cold water real quick! It might help bite when it's happening, but it's not kind to damage that is already done. At this point I am 90% healed, my throat and lips are good and just the sides of my tongue are still stinging.

 

[panamacharlie]

My two cents. You had three things going against you:

1) Cobs

2) partially filled.

3) Butane lighter
Cobs have very open draws. You used a hot flame, and there wasn't enough tobacco in the bowl to insulate you from the flame, so you were likely drawing a lot of actual heat into your mouth.

 

[andrew]

I don't understand the theory that the smoke will not be hot if you're smoking too fast. Why does the pipe get hot then?

 

[pipesmokingtom]

^ Who said that?

 

[Chasing Embers]

1) Cobs

2) partially filled.

3) Butane lighter
Ummm.......pretty sure anyone who has smoked a cob has done so with this combination to no ill effect. Now doing this with a cheap Dunhill will fry your mouth.

 

[bprivateaerdric]

As I understand it, it's not a theory, it's a measurement. They actually measured the temperature of the stream of smoke coming out of a pipestem.
The theory of why that measurement is well below scalding, at least my theory, is that as the airstream expands in the pipestem, due to the vacuum of your sucking, the law of pressure/temperature says that the temperature goes down as the volume expands. Also, the heat you feel in your hand, and the heat transferred to the pipestem are both taken from the air stream. The pipe stem actually acts like the evaporator coil of an air conditioner to cool the smoke.
Whatever the reason, and you may have your theories, the measurements nonetheless exist.
BTW a wood match burns between 600 and 800 degrees (Celsius). If you really sucked all that heat into your mouth, every light would send you to the hospital. Butane burns at about the same temps as a Zippo lighter, in the 2000c range. Booth lose almost all their heat to the tobacco, and it is the heat of tobacco burning, 400-800c, that must disperse before you breathe it in.
Fortunately, it does.
Not that heat is not a problem. It increases the activity of chemicals already present, and produces chemicals not usually present. I think it's unlikely that it physically burns you with heat though. Maybe the very tip of your tongue, if you held it right at the opening before the gas had any chance to expand even further.

--
Temp of pipe smoke http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/16/6/490

Temperature of matches http://www.tcforensic.com.au/docs/article10.html

Lighters http://sciencing.com/temperatures-do-lighters-burn-8475271.html

Gas laws https://physics.info/gas-laws/

 

[pipesmokingtom]

You're receiving a mixture of smoke and steam from the moisture that is a byproduct of combustion. Steam, as far as I understand it, is pretty hot. Hot enough to burn you, even.

 

[pipesmokingtom]

Your link seems to describe the combustion temperature, not the temperature of the smoke stream. Even so, I'm interested in the method they used to test this, as I assume more vigorous drawing would increase the combustion temperature and also the amount of steam that is generated.

 

[bprivateaerdric]

Steam can be quite cool, we all breathe it out with every breath, as a cold day will show. Of course it can also be very hot. But measurements are measurements, and trump theory every time.

 

[bprivateaerdric]

Yes, as I said above, they did not link to the "studies" that measured the stream temperature. I was unable to find them myself. I'll look again now.

 

[pipesmokingtom]

This study seems to indicate that with rapid smoking the smokestream temperature can reach 190c.
Link to Study
Edit: that actually looks to be the actual original study that you linked to, but with more complete information.

 

[bprivateaerdric]

So far I was only able to find this, which shows the temperature dropping rapidly from 600c at the center of the glow to 50c at the beginning of the pipestem. It's from 1956 which seems a long time to go without better measurements.

http://i.imgur.com/Mkr1kqs.png

 

[pipesmokingtom]

I just linked you to the same study, but with full description, which indicates the temperature rises significantly in the stem with more rapid puffing.

 

[bprivateaerdric]

Since they didn't define rapid or where in the stream... I don't know still. That particular mention was for cigarette smoke.
Someone who has a IR meter needs to go ahead and see what they can measure.
But I do know that when I get burned with hot liquid or food, I can feel it. It doesn't feel like hot pepper, it's HOT. I have never yet smoked a pipe so that the stream felt hot. Maybe others have. But it would have to be a lot hotter than what comes out of my pipe to even begin to burn.

 

[balkisobrains]

I'll nitpick a little with your evaporator analogy and say that the condenser would be a better one. (Hot gas cooling to hot liquid in a condenser vs. hot liquid boiling off to a gas in an evaporator due to pressure drop from the increase in internal area as the refrigerant moves past the expansion valve, that change of state using enough energy to draw heat out of the air surrounding the outside of the evap.) ::

 

[pipesmokingtom]

I'll concede that a lot of the steam condenses out in the stem. I can see that clearly enough in my cob stems. What I don't know is how much of it has a chance to condense out. It seems like a simple enough test to set up, and perhaps I will do that this weekend.

 

[bprivateaerdric]

Well, you may know more than I about A/C. Analogy aside, I see the pipe stem as being under negative pressure, which causes the gas to expand. I could be wrong. Measurements would tell us for sure.
I was tempted to go out and put the lit bowl of a pipe in my mouth and blow the stream on a cooking thermometer, but blowing that way makes an increase in pressure in the reduced pipe stem, exactly the opposite of sucking on it. We need to build a vacuum chamber with a IR sensor with high resolution so we can see the exact distribution of temps across the exiting stream. Just measuring the outside of the stream might miss a hot core in the center.

 

[pipesmokingtom]

How about inserting a probe thermometer in to surgical tubing attached to the stummel and then measuring the temperature with various rates of puffing?