Glow-Sticks?

[Phil]

Hi.

Could someone please help me? I'm no chemist, just a would-be entrepreneur.

I want to make something like one of those single-use glow-sticks, but
smaller, about 25 to 50 micro-liters (0.025 to 0.05 cc / 0.0015 to 0.003
c.i.). When the two reactants meet, they will be slightly stirred by two or
three passes of a 2mm agitator ball within about one twentieth of a second.
After that, I guess diffusion will have to do the rest. I expect the initial
temperature to be about 40 C (100ish F) but will drop to around 10 C (50 F)
after about 1 second unless the heat of reaction delays this.

Here's the catch:

I want the luminosity to exceed 50% of peek within 0.3 second of
introduction (or better yet, even sooner) and drop back below that level
between 1.5 and 3 seconds after introduction. And I need it to be bright,
very bright, relatively speaking in terms of chemical lights. A short but
intense reaction.

Is all this even possible? A firefly's photophore isn't that much smaller,
after all, and is able to switch in a fraction of a second.

Is there normally some catalyst in glow-sticks that retards the reaction? If
so, would removing it have this dramatic an effect on the rate of the
reaction? If not, is there any catalyst that might speed things up this
much?

Might liberated heat energy become a problem?

What are the names of the chemicals I'd need, reactants as well as
catalyst(s), and how might I go about getting them in relatively small
quantities (i.e. gallons rather than tanker trucks).

Thanks in advance for any help anyone can give me!

Phil.

[Steve]

Hi Phil, I'm only just done my third year in a B.Sc. in Chemistry but
I'll try to help you. You should look into chemiluminescense as that is
what you hope to achieve. Controlling these reactions are hard and they
are mostly used for tracing other reactions. The compounds used are
mostly very expensive, I suggest you look them up on the Fisher
Scientific website. They are almost all metal complexes (ie. Ru(bpy)3,
etc.) These are not you're run of the mill, do it at home type
experiments, these require plenty of lab time and expensive and harmful
chemicals, I suggest you only go forward with this if you have a
fumehood, labcoat, goggles, and Nitrile gloves. Good luck, sorry if I
couldn't be more help.
-Steve