Coke and mentos how does it happen

Tilt the cup and slowly pour the soda down the inside of the cup to make as few bubbles as possible. Take the straw out of the soda and put a pipe cleaner in.

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. Remove the pack of Mentos from the tube. Their explanation is this process called nucleation. All the carbon dioxide in the soda — all that fizz — is squeezed into the liquid and looking for a way out. Those tiny bumps are called nucleation sites: places the gas can grab onto and start forming bubbles.

Nucleation sites can be scratches on a glass, the ridges of your finger, or even specks of dust — anywhere that there is a high surface area in a very small volume. The surface of a Mentos is sprayed with over 40 microscopic layers of liquid sugar. That makes it not only sweet but also covered with lots and lots of nucleation sites. In other words, there are so many microscopic nooks and crannies on the surface of a Mentos that an incredible number of bubbles will form around the Mentos when you drop it into a bottle of soda.

Since the Mentos are also heavy enough to sink, they react with the soda all the way to the bottom. The escaping bubbles quickly turn into a raging foam, and the pressure builds dramatically. All that pressure has got to go somewhere, and before you know it, you've got a big geyser happening! Try This at Home! Make sure you wear your goggles and lab coats, so that you are not only protected, you also look cool as you run away from the flying soda.

The Big Question What happens if you drink soda and then eat Mentos? Well, a lot of the fizz goes away as you drink. Then when bubbles are released in your stomach, your stomach can expand a bit. Scanning electron microscope images show the roughness of mint Mentos top and bottom left and fruit Mentos top and bottom right , the scale bars representing lengths from 20 to micrometres.

The startling reaction between Diet Coke and Mentos sweets, made famous in thousands of YouTube videos, finally has a scientific explanation. Theories abound as to why this happens, with some bloggers speculating that it is an acid-base reaction because Coke is acidic.

Experiments in a edition of the Discovery Channel programme Mythbusters suggested the chemicals responsible for the reaction are gum arabic and gelatine in the sweets, and caffeine, potassium benzoate and aspartame in the Coke.

But there have been no rigorous scientific studies of the reaction until now. To find out more, Coffey and a team of students tested the reactions between Diet Coke and fruit Mentos, mint Mentos, and various ingredients such as other mints, dish-washing detergent, table salt and sand.

They also compared reactions using other fizzy liquids such as caffeine-free and sugary colas, as well as soda water and tonic water. The results showed that Diet Coke created the most spectacular explosions with either fruit or mint Mentos, the fountains travelling a horizontal distance of up to 7 metres.