Why do mentos react to coke

If you try this project with regular Coke, the eruption should still happen but its sugary content may make cleaning more difficult. This activity brought to you in partnership with Science Buddies. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American.

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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.

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Contact Us. ReAgent Chemical Services. Check out our image below, and yes, we dropped the Mentos in at the same time!! The drink on the right had just come out of the fridge we cooled the Mentos too , and the one on the left was at room temperature — what a difference! We made a video too….

At warmer temperature CO2 gas particles and other molecules have more energy. Therefore, the particles move faster and want to escape the liquid they are dissolved in quickly compared to cooler temperatures. Try cracking open a can of warm fizzy drink and compare it to one just from the fridge! A 2 Litre bottle of coke or lemonade have 8 litres of CO2 dissolved in them.

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.