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http://blogs.lib.ncsu.edu/chem/date/20080216 Saturday February 16, 2008

Diet coke and Mentos!

There are all kinds of cool explosive chemicals that we will explore in this blog this semester.  The first will be the diet coke and mentos reaction.

This isn't truly an explosive chemical process in the true sense of the word - because explosive kind of implies combustion and heat, which is not going on here!  But I thought that this would be a cool one to start with.  Watch this three minute video from youtube that shows a fountain effect of this reaction. 

But what is really happening here?  Well it is a physical process, the CO2 in the bubbles are more attracted to the candy than they are to the soda - so they come out of solution, and well, explode!  Here is more information of the reaction from a mythbusters episode. 

Remember, this only works with the minty kind of mentos, because they have the right kind of nucleation sites for the CO2 to be attracted to!  And it also only works with diet coke, because sugar molecules are too sticky - they hold on to the CO2 better. 

And although you probably will only get soaking wet if you chug diet coke with mentos in your mouth, it is not something I would recommend!



Posted at 05:20PM Feb 16, 2008 by CHRISTIAN, CAROLINE in Explosive chemistry  |  Comments[2]


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