Ever wondered what Year 9 students got up to in their science lessons? Check out this video to see what they’ve been doing recently.
The students learnied how dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) turns directly to a gas without melting into a liquid first – a process called sublimation.
Here is student’s account.
In Science class, we did some interesting experiments to demonstrate sublimation. Sublimation is the action of solid converts into gas. We used dry ice as the material and worked on it.
So, what is dry ice? There’s an experiment that impressed me: we put some dry ice in a plastic bottle with little amount of water, put a cork in the bottle to block the bottle mouth, and then observe what will happen. We found that most of the corks came out of the bottle with a loud pop. The teacher told us substances all have three states: solid, liquid and gas. Dry ice is the solid state of Carbon Dioxide, if dry ice gets into room temperature, it will convert into carbon dioxide without getting into a liquid state. When the bottle is filled with a big amount of carbon dioxide gas, the power of gas will inflate the bottle then push the cork out of the bottle, making the loud pop sound.
The teacher used many fun experiments to let us have a clear intuition grasp of how sublimation works, and they really helped me understand changes between each state of matter better.
By Sinya Xia
