Hello! Today is a Monday, and maybe if you've been reading my blogs you may have noticed that on Mondays, I have Science! We're going to have a special experiment on Wednesday this week (something to do with dry ice!) so be on the lookout for a blog about that.
Anyway, let's talk about today. We just did a small experiment in which we had the following materials...
Materials
Candle
Petrie dish (or a bowl/plate works fine too)
Cup
Lighter/Matches
What was our aim?
To see what happens to the water level when the candle is covered
Hypothesis
I predict that the gas from the fire will just form an interesting looking pattern.
Something that looks similar to this.
What is happening inside the cup?
Essentially the flame of the candle is consuming the oxygen. As you can in the picture above, it talks about high pressure and low pressure. While the cup is on the flame, the pressure is high, and when you release the cup, the air gets cold and that's what causes low pressure. So basically the air is expanding and the water is contracting. When you do the experiment, you can see tiny bubbles escaping under the cup which shows that the increased air pressure from the heated air as the candle burns. Once the candle runs out of oxygen, the candle burns out and the remaining air inside cools down.
Conclusion
As soon as we covered the lit candle with the cup the water started to rise a little, maybe even bubble before the candle went out in less than a few seconds. Not much happened in today's experiment but like I mentioned earlier, this was just a small one for today.
Here's a video you could check out of someone do this experiment so you can visually see what we did!
Excellent Shreya this is a great experiment write up, you went into a lot of detail in your discussion talking about about what you think is happening to cause the water to rise, and it looks like you investigated well. Ka pai.
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