I hope i'm posting in the right place to get the attention of the people who come up with how to solve the problem of diet coke and mentos
anyway i was taking an interest in the diet coke and mentos thing until you guys just did poor science. you put a glazing over the mentos to see if that would stop the fizzing, and then aclaimed that to the fact that this proved nucleation sites were aiding the expulsion of CO2. That is bad science, sorry guys!! All that proves, is that the coating dosn't aid in the expulsion of gas. I mean come on, you covered up the mentos!!!!! how is the mentos supposed to react through a coating! you did not prove, in any way, that the number of nucleation sites is correlated to the amount of "eruption". Why don't you try smoothing out the surface and doing some AFM (Atomic Force Microscopy) to prove your surface is smoother than say, a skittle, which does little to nothing (i think?).
please consider what your claim before you claim something false.
the dry ice thing is notourious and a lot easier to do than with dry ice. the military mre chem heaters work on the same basic science. Add a little texas pete for effect and u have a tear gas simulator. Completely awesome Army Wfie
I dont know if this is where im suposed to post this but i remember it when i was watching the diet coke episode.
so i was wondering if anyone else knew about "the works" bomb. Its not that big but it is entertaining. All you need is an empty soda bottle, some of "the works" cleaning solution ( and yes it has to be "the works" brand name) and tin foil rolled into little loose balls. you put the works solution in the bottle, add the tin foil, shake and throw...it will explode!!
I think it would be cool if the myhtbusters could make the explosion as big as possible.
I just watched this show, and towards the end, the boys begin making some bombs of different types. I am in the Army, and a bomb that I have made myself is called an MRE bomb. A meal ready to eat (MRE) comes pre-packed with a heater. If you take the heater and break it up, place it in a plastic bottle (like the dry ice), add a little (very little) water, and replace the top. It will explode. The heater is made up of some chemicals of some sort and I know that this is not a myth, but it's kind of cool.
Saw episode where someone was supposed to have burst their stomach with mentos and soda. Sorry guys, but you bungled it. The real cow stomach was a nice try, but you forgot to account for other internal organs. You did much the same as inflating a ballon, the pressure is evenly distributed. But with the other organs in the way, the pressure would follow the path of least resistance. Like inflating a ballon then squeezing it. The stomach would streach between the other organs, streaching a localized area of tissue, thus increasing the liklyhood of rupture. Have fun, be safe, and keep Adam from sharp objects. Logicalthought.
i just watched your mentos and coke episode and saw you try and fail to make a rocket powered by this stuff. now all through the program i was wondering why did you struggle with new nozzles for the rocket when instead you could have easily made a more potent fuel. you had already found all the ingredients that make it work, so why not remove all the unnecessary ingredients and make your own "super diet coke" to mix with mentos?
I posted this once already- right episode, wrong thread. Figured I repost it where it belongs...
In the military ration packs (Meals- Ready to Eat, or MRE) is included a chemical heating pouch. "The directions say" to insert the ration entre into the pouch, pour in some water, and wait. The water reacts to the sodium-something-or-other in the chemical pad and heats up- quickly.
A common prank was to tear up one of the chem pads, shove the pieces into a soda bottle, add a little water, cap and shake the bottle, throw it and run. The resulting explosion rivaled the sounds of the 'official' artillery simulators we were issued.
One of the potential contributions to your failure to make a mentos/coke-powered rocket was the addition of more mentos to add thrust rather than the addition of more coke. I seem to remember testing this a while back and finding that coke was the limiting reactant - not the mentos. In fact, I think a lone mentos (mento?) was actually sufficient to burn up the reactants in a 2 litre coke.
Now, whether or not it would be possible to make a viable rocket with the addition of heavy 'coke fuel' rather than those conveniently light mentos I'll leave up to those with experience in the area =]
Hello I saw the show today and it made me think about when I was younger some friend and I would take some "The Work" toilet cleaner and some aluminum foil and put it in a 2 liter bottle and it would blow up similar to the dry ice and water. I think you should try that on your show.
I recently helped a group of Cub Scouts build rockets using 2 liter soda bottles. An initial attempt with mentos and diet coke launched at 45 degrees traveled 145 feet, a bit further than Adam and Jamie were able to do in this show. We'll revisit our design and document the results as a challenge to Adam. (Didn't Jamie say he doesn't like challenges?)
Joined late...I want to know if Diet Coke..rather than regular Coke matters...no aplogies for not reading earlier posts...too tired to deal with them...this thing has been going on forever...I just spent a week in Bahrain...then took 10 days leave. This Mentos thing was old before I left...
Tonight I'm gonna test it on myself. I will drink diet coke and eat mentos...hopefully get back to you guys. (luckily my girlfriend loves mentos) I only got a pack so it may not be enough...later.
When I did my science project with mentos and various soda drinks, I found out that diet rite cola goes up higher than diet coke. I also discovered that fruit flavored mentos work better than mint flavored mentos. When I tried it with 4 fruit mentos with diet rite, it went 10 ft and diet coke with 4 fruit mentos went just 6 ft.
Great episode, very entertaining. However, I find some flaws in the experimentation process. You forgot a fundamental of chemical reactions, in that two substances added to each other react at a faster rate when there is more surface area in which to react. As already said above, the reason the coated mentos did not react at all is that the soda had no "active" ingredients touching in which to react against.
The reason each ingredient, when put into the soda, achieved roughly the same height is due to the fact that all chemicals were added in powdered form. Each grain of said powder has the potential of acting as a nucleation site, but each reaction did not reach the same height of the whole mento because as soon as most of the individual grains generated, the most likely dissolved completely into the liquid.
I would argue that the ingredients in either do not matter at all. My theory is that the soda itself has differing CO2 levels between diet and regular types. The reason the mento would react more with the soda than with the soda water would be that the soda water doesn't necessarily contain exactly as much CO2 as the soda.
I will test this theory soon enough. The idea would be to create a synthetic mento, an object with the same physical, but not chemical, characteristics of the mento, and dropping it into a soda and measuring any difference in result. One other thing I must test to confirm my theory is to measure the CO2 release between shaking a bottle of soda and that of soda water, via the same way visually demonstrated in the episode with a balloon.
Hopefully I'll have some results to report to you guys. I couldn't have made as many hypotheses if you guys didn't provide enough test data for me to build upon.
P.S. Where can one find pure reagents, such as the components Adam was testing with?
I've done some experimentation. I smoothed the surface of a mento and had an untouched for for a control. Placed into two bottles, the smooth produced little to no reaction, whereas the other caused more fizzing. This leads me to conclude that the ingredients do not matter in the mento. Later, I will test the CO2 output of diet and regular cola, as well as plain soda water. I'm reasonably sure that they will be most to least reactive, respectively.
I wonder if either Adam or Jamie will respond to any of this. After all, it's their theory that I'm refining here.
