I don’t know why we’ve ever tried this Coke and Mentos experiment explosion before. After watching Wreck-It Ralph we knew we had to finally give it a try. All you need is a bottle of Coke and a packet of Mentos.
You Will Need
- Diet Coke Works Best according to Science Sparks although we used normal coke
- A packet of Mentos
- Willing scientists
Simply add the Mentos to a bottle of Coke, stand well back and watch it explode. You definitely need a lot of space.
We were really impressed with how high the coke goes. It is a really impressive explosion.
The next day we tried it with five bottles of Coke. So much fun.
What’s The Big STEM Idea?
Despite what you might think, this is not a chemical reaction at all. It’s actually a physical reaction. If you watch soda in a glass you can see a stream of bubbles rising up. These bubbles start at imperfections in the glass. Mentos have thousands of small pores on their surface. Each pore encourages the carbon dioxide (CO2) gas to be released from the soda. So given that there are thousands of pores over the surface of a Mento, this reaction happens a lot! And because the Mento is dropped and passes through the volume of liquid the reaction is forced to happen as it passes through fresh soda. This causes a foam of bubbles to jet out of the bottle.
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