Science. It works.

[xiphias]

Yesterday, Lis and I went to 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.

Comments

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Science in action! Always nifty.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Cool!

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Cold, even!

[ron_newman]

Very cool story. But think you're lucky that the glass didn't shatter, since ice is more voluminous than water.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Well, the ice was expanding upward out of the bottle. Because it froze into slush before it froze solid, it could move up.

Yes...

[shmuelisms.livejournal.com]

But does it work EVERY time?


[Just kidding]

Re: Yes...

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

Yes, but not because of "science", it's the cold fairies, and those little critters have OCD like you wouldn't believe. They have to, they are doing very important work. If we didn't have cold fairies freezing stuff at the right times, polar bears wouldn't have homes.

[kiya]

... is the real Coke a reasonable price at CostCo? I'm out of K4P Coke.

[ckd]

Hmm. I bought some of the MexiCoke for part 1 of my b-day party...I should get another flat of it for Saturday.

[rho]

I suspect it's more likely that you'd actually supercooled the coke, and that opening it up introduced something that could act as a nucleus for crystallisation.

There's not a whole lot of gas in a coke bottle, and while I don't know the exact amounts or the exact pressure changes involved, I can't imagine that they'd be enough to overcome the latent heat released during crystallisation.

Still awesome, of course, but different explanation.

[whuffle.livejournal.com]

Used to do this with glass bottles of rootbeer during a specific show I worked with the gals in the costume shop. We had the timing down so we knew exactly which scene the rootbeer had to go into the freezer during in order to be ice cold when we popped it out at intermission. Take the cap off and we always ended up with a 2 -3 inch neck worth of rootbeer slushy snowflakes.