202 litros de Coca-Cola Light. 523 Mentos. De aquí no puede salir nada bueno

Hace ya algunas semanas, mi hermano llegó a casa visiblemente emocionado con un nuevo descubrimiento que había hecho junto a sus amigos. Afirmaba que, si echabas un Mentos dentro de una botella de Coca-Cola, el líquido salía disparado hacia arriba a causa de una reacción de se producía.

En YouTube existen multitud de vídeos demostrando este hecho, pero ante mis reticencias iniciales, y para alegría de mi madre, procedimos a hacer la prueba en el fregadero con una lata en vez de una botella. Efectivamente, se produce un efecto geyser. ¿Por qué? En Steve Spangler Science lo explican… más o menos:

Here’s the question of the day… Why do Mentos mixed with soda produce this incredible eruption? You should know that there is considerable debate over how and why this works. While we offer the most probable explanations below, we also understand and admit that other explanation could be possible… and we welcome your thoughts.

[...]

When you drop the Mentos into the soda, the gelatin and gum arabic from the dissolving candy break the surface tension. This disrupts the water mesh, so that it takes less work to expand and form new bubbles. Each Mentos candy has thousands of tiny pits all over the surface. These tiny pits are called nucleation sites – perfect places for carbon dioxide bubbles to form. As soon as the Mentos hit the soda, bubbles form all over the surface of the candy. Couple this with the fact that the Mentos candies are heavy and sink to the bottom of the bottle and you’ve got a double-whammy. When all this gas is released, it literally pushes all of the liquid up and out of the bottle in an incredible soda blast. You can see a similar effect when cooking potatoes or pasta are lowered into a pot of boiling water. The water will sometimes boil over because organic materials that leach out of the cooking potatoes or pasta disrupt the tight mesh of water molecules at the surface of the water, making it easier for bubbles and foam to form.

Pero claro, unos cuantos colegas juntando los céntimos sueltos para hacer la gracia es algo que no tiene ni punto de comparación frente a The Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments.

(Visto en MAKE.)

[tags]coca-cola, mentos, quimica, experimento[/tags]