Conservation of Mass Investigation

Introduction:

The lab we did in class was the Conservation of Mass Lab Investigation! My hypothesis for the experiment was that the balloon will fill up with gas on both experiments because a chemical reaction will take place and somehow create gas from the reaction.

Results:

On the left is the pop rocks and soda bottle with soda after it was shaken! That was the biggest I could get to go after shaking it a few times. On the right is the baking soda and vinegar experiment for the biggest it ever got.

This is the soda and pop rock bottle experiment when we first put the pop rocks inside the soda bottle and the reaction wasn’t as big as we had expected. As we watched the pop rocks they didn’t dissolve all the way so we gave them a little help by shaking it.

This was just after 4 four shakes with pop rock soda!
This was the highest we could get the pop rock soda to get after multiple shakes!

This was the baking soda vinegar bottle at its highest, it went straight up to that height without shaking it! The reaction that I could see that was happening at the base of the bottle was just like the alka-seltzer tablets in the previous experiment except this was producing gas to blow up the balloon.

Conclusion:

The reason that the balloon was able to collect the gas and preserve it was due to the law of conservation of mass which states that mass cannot be created nor destroyed. The science behind creating the pop rocks to pop is to heat the ingredients to boiling point and mix it with carbon gas under high pressure! This process causes tiny high pressure bubbles of carbon dioxide to form inside the candy! In the experiment, a physical reaction was taking place, the gas that showed in the balloon was just coming from the soda and not the pop rocks. So according to this information my hypothesis was wrong. The balloon did fill up with gas on both experiments but it wasn’t because a chemical reaction was taking place, but a physical reaction because of the soda! The pop rocks in the soda had only caused a little bit of the carbon dioxide from the soda to escape. Something that we could have changed in the experiment is to have bigger balloons so that more pop rocks could fit into it and into the soda bottle to make the balloon gas bigger. Also, the baking soda vinegar was bigger and more effective than the other experiment because it inflated on its’ own without the need of shaking it.