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Clouds With Ethanol
Clouds With Ethanol
Reason behind
So increasing pressure of a gas causes warming and decreasing pressure causes cooling. But there's one
more thing. Pumping air into your soft drink bottle increases the internal temperature and therefore
also increases the rate of evaporation of the ethanol (and some water) from the wet surfaces inside.
Releasing that high pressure suddenly causes a rapid and dramatic fall of temperature inside the bottle
causing the ethanol vapour (and some water vapour) to condense into tiny droplets of visible liquid.
Each of those droplets reflects visible light forming a dense white fog, or cloud.
Pumping air back into the bottle causes the internal temperature to rise again so those droplets
evaporate once more and the air inside turns crystal clear once more.