The YouTube account kreosan performs science experiments from their backyard in Lugansk, Ukraine. Which also happens to be a war zone at the moment, which you can actually hear shells being fired in the video. But that does not stop them from continuing their amazing sceince projects such as this explosive one.
Forget Diet Coke and Mentos, that’s kid’s stuff from 2002. Coke and butane is the new hotness. These gentlemen take a regular Coca-Cola plastic bottle, extract some of the soda and then fill the remaining free area of the bottle with butane. What happens next is an actual rocket blasting off that goes well into the sky.
Redditor Funktapus drops some science on us:
Coca-Cola is filled with dissolved CO2. The CO2 can escape (creating gas) if the partial pressure of CO2 is too low next the liquid. That’s why Coke goes flat if you leave it exposed to air.
Next we have butane, which is a nonpolar liquid at low temperatures, but boils at about 0 Celsius. When you add a bunch of butane to the coke bottle, it probably starts to form a liquid on top of the coke (it won’t mix), which causes water ice to form, which acts as an insulator.
Now, you flip the bottle. Not only does the liquid butane come into contact with warm coke, which causes it to boil, creating butane gas… but the newly gaseous butane doesn’t contain any CO2. That causes CO2 to rush into the new butane bubbles and expand even more.
The end result: a bunch of new butane gas and CO2 gas, also known as an explosion.
Probably a better explanation than my thesis of “There were a lot of soda bubbles and shit blew the fuck up.”
[Reddit]