How to Make a Diet Coke & Mentos Bomb

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Colin Kilbane and I'm going to show you how to make a diet Coke and Mentos bomb, or soda fountain. Now diet Coke works better than other sodas for a couple reasons: the particular mix of of flavorings and artificial sweeteners they have in here, makes a little bit of a bitter after-taste and they car, compensate for that by putting more carbonation in diet Coke than other, other comparable colas or other soft drinks, and that's important here. Carbonation is important. Carbonation is merely dissolved carbon dioxide gas, and when you pull it out, open it up, you can hear it escaping and the soda bubbles. Now, the bubbles will come out at a very slow rate. You'll, you know, if you want your soda completely flat, you might have to leave it open for well over many hours. That's because bubbles take a finite amount of energy to form. A bubble is an organized structure, and it takes a little bit of energy for this bubble to form. Now, one way to give it more energy, to get more and more bubbles is to shake the soda. But we're not going to do that. We're actually going to lower the energy needed to make the bubble, and that's what you do with a Mento. Sugar is a crystal, and each crystal has edges. This is a cubic crystal, sugars a cubic crystal, so it has twelve edges, and those edges reduce the energy needed to form a bubble. They basically a blow a bubble to nucleate. I have a old cap from an old two-liter here and I've drilled about a quarter-inch hole in the cap. Don't need to be precise here. And then all I've got is a piece of wire and I've twisted a loop at the end for my finger to pull on the wire. Put the cap on. Put...I have knocked a hole in the Mentos here. Thread the Mentos on the wire, on the bottom. That is the wire down to hold the Mentos on. Now 'cause here's what we're going to do: you're going to take the cap off the bottle, slowly. Wait for the foam to go down, then we're going to put this cap on top. We go find an area outdoors. Don't do this indoors, 'cause this thing can shoot up a good forty feet. I made that mistake once! We're going to put the cap on and then all you need to do is hold the bottle, and we're going to pull the wire, and the Mentos drop off into the soda. At that point, you're going to want to run because this thing can get very messy very fast. So that's my home-made solution. You actually can get a really nifty launcher here, a re...really nifty trigger from Steve Spangler Science, called a Geyser Tube and this is beneficial. You can always stick about five Mentos between the top of the cap and the top of the liquid. You don't want the Mentos touching the liquid inside the soda because it'll start the reaction before you're ready. But with this one, you can get many more Mentos in. It just screws on the top, and you drop the Mentos in, put the cap on, and then in order to launch it, you just pull the pin. Mentos drop into the soda. This piece here drops over the holes where the pin went through to seal it off and you get a very nice reaction there, and that's a little bit cooler because you have a lot more Mentos. So let's go outside and we'll try to shoot off a little bit of diet Coke here. A soda fountain, or a diet Coke and Mentos bomb. Alright, let's go! Alright, five, four, three, two, one! And that is a diet Coke and Mentos bomb."