Trebor the Mad Overlord has sent us a little scientific research he conducted called “Menticulation of Diet Coke In Microgravity“. Robert Woodhead and his son spent weeks making arrangements to expose Diet Coke and Mentos to each other in Microgravity. I’ll spare you the abstract and just get to the video part:

Here is the crux of their inquiry:

As described in a previous post, the hypothesis that we wanted to test was that convection of the soda was an important part of the whole reaction; under normal gravity, bubbles formed around the mentos rise up through the soda, allowing more soda to come in contact with the candy, and thus more bubbles form. However, in microgravity, there’s no “up”, so any bubbles that form will just stay near the mento, and will in fact keep new cola from reaching it.

Robert follows this with a detailed and well written analysis of what when right, what went wrong, and how the next Menticulator is going to totally blow this one out of the water.

How is this relevant to robots!? I hear you cry. Well, Robert and his kids are regular competitors, participants and supporters of RoboGames. Plus, you know you wanted to see this whether it had a robot actually in it or not.

[Thanks Robert Woodhead!]

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 6:16 pm and is filed under Neat Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.