FUN SCIENCE PROJECT
What you
will need to do this experiment is a bottle of soda.
Get the cheap stuff for 50 cents a
bottle because you won’t be
drinking it. You will also need 1 roll of mentos
mints and
while you are at it get a sheet of vizaqueen plastic
or an old
shower curtain or a plastic tarp.
You will also
probably want to do this outside as you will have a huge
mess inside and
your mom and dad will not like you or the experiment
if you
conduct this inside.
Open up the bottle of soda.
Do this carefully as it may fizz and you do not want
to lose the soda. Put the bottle of soda on the ground in a
place that it will not
easily fall over. You
will also want this
away from your house, car or anything else you do not
want to
get messed up. A
good patch of open ground works well.
Take a piece of paper and roll to be
the approximate size of the roll of Mentos.
Take the Mentos out of their container and put in the
paper roll in the same way they were packaged.
Take the roll of paper with the Mentos
directly over the open bottle of soda and let all of the
mints slide into the soda at the same time.
Do not do this
slowly. They should
all fall quickly form the tube.
GET BACK QUICKLY unless you like the
idea of a soda shampoo. By
the way you may want to wear some old clothes.
Okay now the soda will shoot off like a
cannon spurting soda everywhere.
This is so cool.
Make sure to have friends watch this science project
display.
OKAY WHY IS THIS A SCIENCE PROJECT
AND WHY DOES THIS REACTION HAPPEN?
You may have seen similar
demonstrations with this and many have their opinions.
Here is ours. If you have further documentation of
this please let us know and we will update our web page
correctly.
Soda is
sugar, water, coloring and flavoring. The soda
companies take the sugar water filled bottles and pump a gas
called carbon dioxide into the bottles and immediately cap
them. They do this with a lot of pressure. The gas stays
dormant in the soda until you open it and expose it to
oxygen in the air.
This causes the gas to be able to expand. When the
gas is pressure pumped into the bottles the gas binds with
the water and the water holds the gas inside.
If you shake a bottle of soda and
immediately open it the gas has been separated from the
water and is free and upon allowing the oxygen to enter also
allows the gas to expand and that is why you will have an
explosion of soda.
Do you notice that an ice cube will fizz slightly
when you put it into soda and bubbles will form around it?
The reason behind this is that the water itself in
the soda sticks together. Let’s expand on this. Think of the
water droplets like a whole bunch of tiny magnets. They will
cling together. If there is something in the middle of them
they will surround the object to still cling together the
best they can. The water droplets cling together around gas
bubbles. When we drop an ice cube in, we break up some of
the water and release some gas bubbles which now gather
around the surface of the ice cube. When you break up the
water grouping you allow gas to release and when it does
this the gas expands and therefore causes more gas bubbles.
When you put the Mentos into the soda the ingredients
in the Mentos cause the water to breakup house and release
the gas. Not just a few like when you dropped the ice cube
in but all the water
molecules. This causes all the pressurized gas to release
which allows expansion and creation of more and more bubbles
and when they have to expand where can they go if they are
contained inside a bottle? No where but out the top and
since the top is a small opening the gas comes out like
gangbusters.
This happens with other items mixed together like a cherry
ice cream soda float. While you are at it, please use diet
soda. This seems to work better and will not be as sticky of
a mess to clean.
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