What makes mentos explode

Look from the side to see if bubbles also form on the pipe cleaner. Now take the pipe cleaner out and place a Mento in the soda. Watch the Mento from the side to see what happens. The bubbles are made of a gas called carbon dioxide. The soda company puts carbon dioxide in the soda to make the soda fizzy. If you could look at the straw, pipe cleaner, and Mento with a super-strong microscope you would see that they have tiny dents, scratches, and bumps on them.

There is a pretty cool thing you can do with a bottle of soda pop and a packet of Mentos. Wrap the paper around the pack of Mentos to make a tube. Use masking tape to tape the tube closed. An experiment on Seltzer water, adding various types of solutes, produced the following results:. This mixture was first formulated by an American pharmacist, John S. Pemberton , in — though it was originally marketed as a panacea for common ailments. The original ingredients of Coca-Cola contained cocaine from coca leaves and caffeine-rich extracts from kola nuts.

The present-day ingredients of Coca-Cola classic are a little different:. Diet Coke and Coke Zero react better with Mentos than regular Coke does because of the absence of sugar. A lack of sugar makes the soda mixture less viscous, given the presence of sweeteners, like aspartame, lowering the surface tension even more than usual.

This in turns means that the carbon dioxide gas is more rapidly released. The nucleation process is also faster, leading to higher gas pressure. We can see how much better Diet Coke and Coke Zero react with Mentos just by looking at the experiment we showed earlier: both of these sugar-free sodas produced fountains that exceeded 2. So, in a nutshell or, more aptly, a Mentos shell , soda mixtures with more sugar in them are more viscous, making their reactions less powerful.

All content published on the ReAgent. School Success. The Scholastic Store. Book Clubs. Book Fairs. Please enter a valid email address. However, if there are sharp edges or fine particles in the liquid, these have surfaces that allow the CO 2 molecules to start bubble formation more easily these are called nucleation points.

Mentos tablets contain thousands of these nucleation points and when dropped into Coke, they allow the bubbles to form almost instantaneously. To understand how the surface of the Mento causes the CO 2 bubbles to nucleate, think about how rock candy is made.

A string or a stick is immersed into a supersaturated mixture of sugar and water, and crystals of sugar nucleate around the stick. Without immersing the stick, the crystals will grow eventually, but the stick speeds up the process by providing a surface for nucleation.

This pressure effect of gases and liquids also has a more dangerous aspect as well: when scuba divers go to great depths in the ocean, they are breathing air, or specialized gas mixtures, at four or more times atmospheric pressure. Because of this, nitrogen dissolves into their blood stream in much higher amounts than would happen at the ocean surface.

The exploding water in the garbage can demonstrates what happens when a gas, which is confined by pressure, is released suddenly: it expands very rapidly, blowing out everything in its way. The gas used in this experiment is liquid nitrogen, which was carefully anchored beneath the water.