Nitrogen bang

Our rocket is too small... Luckily, Robin knows a great experiment to make the bottle a bit bigger! What do we need for this? Some liquid nitrogen.

The air we breathe consists mostly, as much as 78%, of nitrogen.Nitrogen is usually a gas, but if you make it very cold, colder than -196 degrees Celsius, it becomes liquid. And if you make that liquid warmer than -196 degrees Celsius again, it starts to boil and becomes a gas again.

For the experiment, Robin pours liquid nitrogen into a plastic bottle. Because the treehouse is much warmer than -196 degrees, the liquid nitrogen quickly becomes a gas again.

When the bottle is thrown into a vat of water, it goes even faster. Water can absorb a lot of heat without changing temperature quickly. A litre of liquid nitrogen is then converted into as much as 700 litres of gas!

This means a lot of gas enters the bottle, and the pressure becomes very high. Eventually, the bottle can no longer handle that pressure and explodes with a loud bang. This is an explosion without fire, just due to the pressure of the gas!

Did Robin manage to make the bottle rocket bigger?