Coke and Mentos Powered Rocket Car!

www.theblaze.com...
Wow! This is pretty cool but what a waste of money!!! I wonder if they had any items donated it is free advertising afterall. It does make you wonder though if there is a way to use other cost effective chemicals to use as fuel

The Coke Zero & Mentos Rocket Car uses a piston mechanism: a six-foot long rod sits inside a six-foot long tube attached to each bottle of Coke Zero. When the Mentos drop into the soda, the pressure tries to push the rod out of the tube. With 54 rods all pushing at once, that gives us a lot of power

reply to post by AllUrChips


Mentos has a very high surface area because it is pitted. Coke has carbonated water, together you get an effect called nucleation.



Science is fun.

reply to post by projectvxn


Why is the sky blue?
condescendingly 2nd.

reply to post by AllUrChips


Actually I don't know.



Edit:
So wait...you think I was being condescending instead of providing info?

My aren't we sensitive.

reply to post by AllUrChips


I'm surprised Myth Busters didn't think of this experiment first. Funny clip and quite an expensive experiment.

lol! My husband did this mentos and coke thing with the nephews last summer.. and the sister in law was not amused. They stuck balloons on the bottle.. they even put toy cars on the mouth of the bottle. Soda EVERYWHERE. What pissed the SIL off was that they did this.. the booby trap. You GOTTA love instructables!!!.
www.instructables.com...

This is epic fountain mixed of Mentos and Coke. I would have brang one glass at least on this one.



Thruthseek3r

I wouldn't be scared if the next ww feature a USA-developed "UFO"s =]

Originally posted by AllUrChips
reply to post by projectvxn

 

Why is the sky blue?
condescendingly 2nd.

Because of the reflection of the oceans.... eon's ago over North America the sky had a greenish tint due to the massive amount of forests...

Originally posted by Areyoupeopleinsane

Originally posted by AllUrChips
reply to post by projectvxn

 

Why is the sky blue?
condescendingly 2nd.

Because of the reflection of the oceans.... eon's ago over North America the sky had a greenish tint due to the massive amount of forests...

Nuh-uh. Im pretty certain that the sky is blue cause God ran out of colors early on because they only had primary colors back then in the olden days..... and thats gotta be the truth because we only got the big boxes in the late 70's with the sharpener in the bottom... so he had to paint both the sky and oceans blueish.

reply to post by AllUrChips


Lucky they're using that nasty zero sugar crap, they're doing us a favor by wasting a bunch of it like that.

I was surprised to see how much power was produced from only 54 bottles of coke. That design was also a bit leaky and not perfect.

If they were using specially made chemicals (instead of coke and mentos) and they were using a high quality design it would go much further.

Originally posted by Areyoupeopleinsane

Originally posted by AllUrChips
reply to post by projectvxn

 

Why is the sky blue?
condescendingly 2nd.

Because of the reflection of the oceans.... eon's ago over North America the sky had a greenish tint due to the massive amount of forests...

I am sorry but that is not why its blue.

"The blue color of the sky is due to Rayleigh scattering. As light moves through the atmosphere, most of the longer wavelengths pass straight through. Little of the red, orange and yellow light is affected by the air.

However, much of the shorter wavelength light is absorbed by the gas molecules. The absorbed blue light is then radiated in different directions. It gets scattered all around the sky. Whichever direction you look, some of this scattered blue light reaches you. Since you see the blue light from everywhere overhead, the sky looks blue. "

Originally posted by projectvxn
reply to post by AllUrChips

 

Mentos has a very high surface area because it is pitted. Coke has carbonated water, together you get an effect called nucleation.

If range is the objective, simply feed the output of the bottles to a rotary vane motor attached to the rear wheels, and drop pellets in series rather than all at once.

In fact I envision a small car running on this, using a modified combustion engine, might be cheap to run, or atleast enable you to mix the fuel yourself. Instead of having many big uncontrolled burst in parallel, we could have many small controlled bursts in series. creating less torque, but giving longer range.

While we are at it, we need to reduce the fuel to it's simplest components... Carbonated water and mentos. Perhaps the mentos needs to be crushed and made into smaller pellets or mixed with ordinary water to a rich solution and then mixed with carbonated water in a cylinder. The purpose is to facilitate a controlled use of this fuel.

reply to post by aaa2500


I'd be curious as to the operating effectiveness of simple a cola-based nucleation reaction powered turbine engine car. With direct wheel drive, it would likely be faster and travel much further than the rocket car presented as the subject of discussion. Some "youtube scientist(s)" should get on that!

reply to post by aaa2500


Instead of Mentos we could use carbonated water and something else with a high surface area that can be continually used to create the nucleation effect.

But it would be short lived as the carbonated water would be ejected from the tank fairly quickly even if arrested. You could get 3 to 600 feet on 7 gallons of carbonated water before you had to refuel.

Not exactly efficient.

reply to post by projectvxn


You are right, it would never be efficient, but if the goal is to go further than in the video, then they could probably do that easily by powering the wheels instead of the piston. I would build two and race them, hence my comments about fuel costs.