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Jul. 5th, 2010
Science. It works.
Jul. 5th, 2010 01:30 pmYesterday, Lis and I went to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vonbeck's parents' house for an Independence Day cookout. Ben and his father had been working on a recipe for ribs which involved a spice dry-rub, smoking the ribs for an hour, a maple glaze, and caramelizing sugar on it for a finish. It was darned delicious.
Anyway, I brought over some Cokes -- our local Costco occasionally gets in flats of the Mexican Cokes -- the ones that are made with actual sugar, and come in glass bottles that aren't screw-top.
We threw a couple of them in the freezer to chill quickly. We got them pretty darned close to ice-cold, but still liquid.
The Ben opened one. And we watched the entire thing freeze right in the bottle, right before our eyes.
See, the pressure and temperature of gasses are directly related. Increase one, increase the other; decrease one, decrease the other. This is how refrigerators and air conditioners work: you've got a gas in them, and a vacuum pump thingy, and the vacuum pump lowers the pressure on the gas, which lowers the temperature of the gas, and then the fridge cools down. (And then the gas has to condense elsewhere in the system, and it gets hot while doing so, and so you have to have a radiator somewhere on the thing to get rid of that heat.)
Diesel engines also work on this premise -- they start a fire by slamming a piston down hard enough to compress air enough to get hot enough to light diesel fuel.
In this case, we opened the bottle, which dropped the pressure precipitously, and the airspace at the top, and the carbon dioxide throughout the Coke, all dropped pressure and therefore temperature, and, within thirty seconds, Ben had a frozen Coke.
vonbeck's parents' house for an Independence Day cookout. Ben and his father had been working on a recipe for ribs which involved a spice dry-rub, smoking the ribs for an hour, a maple glaze, and caramelizing sugar on it for a finish. It was darned delicious.Anyway, I brought over some Cokes -- our local Costco occasionally gets in flats of the Mexican Cokes -- the ones that are made with actual sugar, and come in glass bottles that aren't screw-top.
We threw a couple of them in the freezer to chill quickly. We got them pretty darned close to ice-cold, but still liquid.
The Ben opened one. And we watched the entire thing freeze right in the bottle, right before our eyes.
See, the pressure and temperature of gasses are directly related. Increase one, increase the other; decrease one, decrease the other. This is how refrigerators and air conditioners work: you've got a gas in them, and a vacuum pump thingy, and the vacuum pump lowers the pressure on the gas, which lowers the temperature of the gas, and then the fridge cools down. (And then the gas has to condense elsewhere in the system, and it gets hot while doing so, and so you have to have a radiator somewhere on the thing to get rid of that heat.)
Diesel engines also work on this premise -- they start a fire by slamming a piston down hard enough to compress air enough to get hot enough to light diesel fuel.
In this case, we opened the bottle, which dropped the pressure precipitously, and the airspace at the top, and the carbon dioxide throughout the Coke, all dropped pressure and therefore temperature, and, within thirty seconds, Ben had a frozen Coke.