Jainam Mehta

It is very intimidating to watch things change their form. Be it melting or freezing, it never ceases to amaze us. Have you ever seen a time-lapse video of a chunk of wherever melt and felt weirdly relaxing? Even if you haven't observed an ice cube melt, you'd surely have wondered how something which was a solid sitting right there, became liquid and started flowing or oozing out of itself, and soon, the solid was no more! In this article, I've tried to explore the mindfulness connected with seeing things change their state through experimentation. There are a number of things that come into play when we try to open up the phenomena involved with change in state - The change may be physical where the material molecules do not react; or chemical, where they actually react to form some other state in combination with other materials.

Observing different materials change their state, apart from the science, is comprised of a number of interesting phenomena that occurs:

The Pattern in which the material changes state - Everything that changes state follow a specific pattern in its form, where it might be symmetric while melting or radially dipositing, while solidifying.
The Aroma or the profound change of smell that the material may emit when it changes state.
The sound that the reactions may give out.
The Unevenness - Absence or Presence of material that occurs when we try to change state of the original material. Often Bubbles or Voids are created when we do these experiments at home, without having any machinery or expertise.

Shredding Plastic

In order to melt plastic easily, it was broken down into smaller bits. This increases the surface area.
Plastic Used: HDPE (high density poly-ethylene).
Melting Range: 120 - 180 degree C.

Melting Plastic

The liquid plastic stayed in semi solid form for quite some time.
After 15 mins, it was hard and white.
Inference: When plastic is burned, it releases carbon, which combines with atmospheric oxygen to form carbon dioxide.

Aim: To check whether addition of water to molten plastic helps us to decrease the freezing point of plastic; and to study the change in form that accompany.

Procedure: Heat some bits of plastic until its fully liquid. As soon as we see liquid plastic, without any time delay, pour the same quantity of hot water in it (even a slightest game gap doesn't let the plastic mix with water). Heat both of them together. Keep stirring. After we see a homogeneous mixture, turn off the flame and keep stirring until its solid.

Inference: As water is heated to its maximum, it cools the liquid plastic minimum. Continuous stirring helps in achieving a homogeneous solid mixture of plastic and water.

Observation: The water plastic solid obtained is soft, stretchable very fibrous. It smelled bad and was somewhat elastic, like rubber. The volume of the plastic increases when water is added.

Melting Rubber by Direct Conduction

When prolonged heat was supplied to the eraser, it became semi solid, something like ice cream. It was mouldable but it stayed that way for only how long it was hot.

Semi Solid Eraser at Room Temperature

A DAT (do at home) experiment I tried, aim of which was to create a semi solid mass of eraser, one that stays that way at room temperatures. Using conventional household materials helped in achieving a dough like mass.

Lacto-Fermentation (Process of making Paneer)

Addition of food acid, such as lemon juice, vinegar, citric acid or yogurt, to hot milk, leads to the separation of the curds from the whey. After draining the whey, whats left behind is paneer.

Milk is actually made up of a lot of different components, the main ones being protein, fat, and water. When it comes to curdling, one specific milk protein called casein reacts with itself.
Normally, little groupings of casein are present in the milk, without bonding to anything. These groupings have a negative charge, which makes them repel other casein groups and keeps the casein evenly dispersed in the milk.
When milk becomes acidic (addition of lemon juice, etc) the negative charge on the casein group becomes neutralized by the H+ ion of citric acid (or any other acid).
Then instead of pushing each other apart, the casein starts to clump together. Eventually large enough clumps are formed that we can actually see, and then we have curdled milk.

This process happens slowly at cold or room temperatures and fast at high temperatures.

Aim: To study how the addition of different materials affect the process of curdling.

White Cement: Did Not allow Curdling to occur.

Wax: Allowed Curdling

Baking Soda NaHCO₃ : Partially Allowed Curdling.

Aim: To increase the volume of superglue (feviquick) and decrease its curing time.

Adding Superglue to Water

The glue look lesser time than what it takes normally to cure. After sometime the glue formed a stretchable web like mass in water and the volume also increased.

Adding Superglue to Baking Soda

Feviquick cures almost instantaneously in baking soda. It forms a crystalline solid mass

Superglue into Baking soda water

Feviquick cures very fast and volume is also increased and no webs are formed.

Adding Superglue to Cement

It took comparatively more time to cure but when it did, the mass bound to cement, settled down and got stuck to the container itself.

Experimenting on Camphor - The material which is Sublimable at Room Temperatures.

Directly Igniting Camphor

What's interesting in this is the pattern in which the mass of camphor sublimizes. The material on the periphery gets converted into liquid first, which then, becomes vapour and scent.

Dissolving Camphor in Water

The Camphor did not dissolve or react with water. Sublimation, for camphor, is so inevitable that it occured, after all the water was evaporated.

Dissolving Camphor in Oil

Camphor dissolves in oil. By putting camphor in bulk, we can have something very close to liquid camphor.

Previously done Experiments

Old Experiments - Jainam

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