If you ever wondered how a lava lamp was made or what exactly goes into a lava lamp, then stop worrying about all that because the following article will actually teach you how to make your very own lava lamp. Making a lava lamp can be very easy to do as long as you follow the following steps with perfection. Make sure that you have the following items that will be needed in order to make your own very lava lamp:
Materials that will be required:
* A container such as a soda bottle or a sturdy glass jar, anything that will take the shape of the base in a real lava lamp.
* Some vegetable oil.
* Artificial food coloring for the colorful goo. You may choose any color you like.
* Some Alka-Seltzer tablets. The use of these tablets will be explained later onwards.
* Some ordinary tap water at room temperature.
What to do:
* The very first step involves filling the bottle approximately 3/4th with the vegetable oil. The cheaper the vegetable oil, the better because there is no point using an expensive bottle of vegetable oil as you are not consuming it.
* Next, you will have to fill in the remainder of the bottle with water.
* Now add the food coloring to the water, but be careful as you don’t want to add too much to saturate the water, just add enough to make the water nice and dark.
* Take a single Alka-Seltzer tablet and divide it into about 8 or 9 pieces.
* Now slowly but surely, drop each piece of the Alka-Seltzer tablet into the container. When you start adding these tablets into the water, there will be some bubbling. Once all the bubbling stops, it is time to add another piece of Alka-Seltzer tablet.
* Now that all the tablets have been used, simply screw on the cap or the top of the container or bottle that is being used. Now all you have to do is wait for everything to settle in and then flip the bottle back and forth to get the lava lamp affect.
The main ideology behind the formation of this lava lamp is the fact that oil is less dense than water. Secondly, the tablets that are dropped into the water form small bubbles of carbon dioxide. Once these bubbles are formed, they attach themselves to the particles of colored water. Now we go back to the first ideology behind the formation of a lava lamp, water is dense than oil. Because the water is denser than oil, the color goo always remains separated from the oil.
Source:
http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/experiment/00000035
