10/54 Soap Soufflé

For my tenth experiment, I microwaved soap! WHAT? Just bear with me.

  I dug out the different soaps from my science supply box. I had five different brands of soap as my test subjects.

 

    As you can see they are all different but the best smelling one, in my taste, was the Zest.

    I then took a big bowl of water and put the bars of soap in.

     I first grabbed the Dial soap and placed it in the water… it sunk. I then placed in all the other soaps except the Ivory soap and they all sank.

    Then I placed the Ivory soap and it floated!!

MIND…

BLOWN!

Why was the ivory soap the only soap that floated? Hold your horses for a moment.

   I took out all the bars of soap. It was a slippery situation. Very difficult indeed.

   Taking the slippery ivory soap, I placed it on a plate and cut it into fourths. It was very easy to cut.

  Then I placed it into our microwave.

  I set the microwave for 1 min. As the microwave slowly heated the soap, it began to expand! Bigger and bigger! It almost fell off the plate! Here is what it looked like afterwards.

 

Before and after

   That is SO cool! Mr. Spangler then challenges us to go further and do the same thing to the other soaps. Would there be the same result? See for yourself.

     As you can see the result was not the same. The Zest and Dial soap (two left) had a little sizzling but the Dove and Caress (two right) had no result but got very warm.

    Why did the ivory soap float when the others didn’t? The answer is simply that the Ivory soap is less dense than water. Well, duh! That is why anything floats on water. Part of the reason it is less dense is that the Ivory soap is fiercely whipped into submission. As a result the soap has tons of little air pockets. That is why it was so easy to cut through. The other soap were so darn tough to cut! Anyway, it is because of the little air pockets, the Ivory soap acted as it did in the microwave. The effect is a demonstration of Charles’ Law, which states that as temperature of a gas increases, so does it’s volume. In other words, when a gas (such as air) heats up, it expands, takes up more room. So that is why the Ivory soap “blew up”. All of the air in the air pockets got heated up in the microwave and expanded. This is SO COOL!

9/54 How To Make A CO2 Sandwich

   Today I took a familiar but intriguing chemical reaction and brought it into a popping experience. I took three one-quart plastic bags and in each of them I added 1 tablespoon of baking soda.

      I then filled three snack sized bags with different quantities of vinegar. Using a drinking glass to help me hold the bags open, I filled one bag with a 1/2 cup (120mL) of vinegar, another with a 1/3 cup (80mL), and the last one with 1/4 cup (60mL).

   Then I sealed the snack bags containing the vinegar and placed them inside the quart bags with the baking soda. I then squeezed all the air I could out of the bag.

  Once every bag was set for a scientific reaction, I grabbed a cookie sheet and headed outside.

  Enjoying the  day of warmth, I set the tray on a table. Not knowing which bag to do first, I decided on  the bag with a 1/2 cup of vinegar. With a punch, I broke the inner bag releasing the vinegar. I shook the bag to help the reactants mix.

 

   As the reaction produced carbon dioxide, it filled up the bag, pushing against the plastic as hard as it could.

  It kept growing…..

  ..and growing…

      ..and growing…

..and growing too big for my taste…

     ..and yet it still grew! This is how big it got.

     Then the overstuffed pillow finally popped.

   The next two were not as exciting, but I learned a lot.

   The 1/3 cup vinegar bag was difficult to break.

   But after squeezing it into submission, the vinegar mixed with the baking soda. This is how big the bag got.

  It obviously did not get as big as the 1/2 cup bag. Thus, it did not pop.

    This is the 1/4 cup reaction. the bag didn’t even blow up very big.

   This is an experiment on limiting reactants. In this situation, the limiting reactant is the vinegar. Because it is the only variable changing, everything else is relatively the same. In the 1/2 cup vinegar test, the baking soda had all the vinegar it wanted to make a lot of CO2 . However the 1/3 and the 1/4 cup was not a lot of vinegar to let the baking soda be fully used up. Thus as the amount of vinegar went down, so did the amount of CO2 . There just wasn’t enough vinegar to satisfy the needs of the baking soda. You didn’t know that, in some situations, baking soda can be picky!