Make a geyser with Diet Coke and mentos

last week went 2 do this but my friends found the mentos and ate them!!

When I Did This I Found That Cheap Bottle Of Coke Works Better Than The Leading Brands, (Still Using Mentos).
But I Can’t A Sure You That It Will Work With Your “Cheap” Coke.
I Put 8-10 Mentos Into The Coke And It Made The Coke Go About 8 Feet Into The Air.

This Is Worth Doing I Tell You!

I wrote up a handout, and did this with my kid’s class. Everyone loved.

We then did mini-experiments with cups of coke or plain carbonated soda, adding oil, or salt, or more sugar or aspartame. To see what components made the geyser.

Note to others: don’t use other colas or mints, you actually get a bigger bang with Diet Coke—it’s so carbonated, and aspartame makes it bigger, maybe has more artificial ingredients? A Mythbusters episode actually broke this down. I couldn’t find the whole episode, but here’s a teaser

And most of you may have already seen this coke and mentos ballet, but in case you haven’t:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKoB0MHVBvM

it’s one of those things you only watch on youtube and don’t even imagine to do… but hey, why not?
For few days I’m going on a trip with my friends and I hope we will be having fun mixing coke and mentos

HA I did this one, it was fun to see my friends get completely drenched in sticky diet coke! oh we bought two packs the fruit and the regular, i’d say that a combination worked best. have fun!

While taveling around the country I stumbled into a gas station and saw this display on the counter.

The part of the country where I saw this will remain unnamed. But I will give you this hint: The woman who worked behind the counter was wearing a mullet and one of her front teeth was broken off. (I kid you not.)

My daughter and I agreed that the fruity mentos packed the bigger punch.
What a childish way to spend an afternoon that had gotten too late to go anywheres….

I ran a little further with the ball that R8 started and did another controlled experiment.
I wanted to see if the fruit mentos were more explosive than the mint mentos.
I hypothesize that the “fruity” mentos wont pack the same punch that the minty mentos have.

...once during a family gathering about a year ago. It wasn’t very impressive using sugar-free Mentos.

We decided to to the geyser thing again. We went and bought the diet Sam’s Cola this time, since it is about half the price of regular Coke. We also tried some diet Dr. Thunder and some diet Lemon-Lime just to see what would happen.

1. On the way home from the store the bottles rolled around in the back of the car. When we opened them they started to fizz a little bit. This may have taken some of the energy out of the liquid.
2. It’s possible that also that the variance in formulas between diet Coke and diet Sam’s Cola are enough to account for the difference in performance.

1. We wrapped the Mentos in some toilet paper, tied a string around it, threaded the string through the hole in the cap.
2. We replaced the cap and then lowered the Mentos into the liquid by means of the string.
3. The reaction took place as normal, however the toilet paper and string floated to the top of the liquid and partially plugged the hole in the cap. This caused the liquid to merely sputter out, we got very little altitude.

Then we got smart. My son, found that he could thread a stiff wire through the Mentos. We used this wire method with a bottle of diet Dr. Thunder. It worked beautifully (see the picture). It shot nearly 20 feet into the air. This, in spite of the bottle having rolled around in the car.

We also tried a bottle of Sam’s diet lemon-lime soda. We didn’t do anything special to this one. We simply removed the lid and dropped the Mentos in. We got a reaction, but not very big. Not sure why, whether it had to do with rolling around or just due to the different formula.

With the inconclusive results due to the bottles rolling around in the back of the car, I feel that there is no other choice than to perform further experiments. :-D