Egg Crystals

Egg Crystals

This is quite a nice little experiment and reminds me of things I used to do as a child.  Its a nice comparison test.

First of all you clean out 6 half eggshells.

You need the following:

Bicarbonate of Soda

Salt

sugar

water

food colourings:

You mix a cup bicarbonate of soda with a cup of water and add a few drops of colour, then do the same with the other ingredients.

We then poured the mixtures into the shells. In our experiment, blue is sugar and water, red/purple is salt and water and orange is bicarbonate of soda and water:

You then need to leave it for at least a week.  This next picture is a week after and you can see there are some crystals forming in the bicarbonate of soda and some in the salt, but the sugar is still completely liquid:

This is then probably a month later and there are definite crystals in the bicarbonate of soda shell (and a fly!):

And some quite solid crystals in the salt shell:

The sugar was still liquid one month later!

We then intended to finish the experiment and throw it away, however nothing gets thrown away here so here are the 3 shells 2.5 months later.  The salt is pretty amazing:

 The Bicarbonate of soda also looks very pretty (although no longer orange!):

By this time, the sugar has also crystallised! You can't see it very well but the liquid has totally turned to solid crystal.

I think the salt is definitely the best, but it was interesting to see all the differences along the way. I think I will go and throw them away now!

If you have made it all the way down this far, as always Thank you!