How to make your Lava Lamp

Lava Lamp is a cool science experiment which uses simple house hold items like oil, water, food color and effervescent tablets to create chemical reactions and funky balls of colored blobs that move around like it happens in a real lava lamp! This cool density demonstration was also used in pop culture, but there is also science behind it that we can easily learn from its demonstration.

Safety First! Adult Supervision Required. Don’t Eat/Drink your Experiments, Wear safety goggles where ever required

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Materials and tools required.

From Home

• Transparent glass jar
• Effervescent tablets

Video on Youtube for the Experiment

What to Do!

1. Fill the plastic bowl with water.
2. Add some food color and mix it.
3. Pour the red colored water in the glass jar.
4. Pour refined oil in the bowl
5. Pour 3 bowls of refined oil in the glass vessel.
6. Now put one effervescent tablet in the glass jar.
7. Your lava lamp is ready.

Images for Instructions

Working Principle of Lava Lamp Experiment :

Effervescent tablets are technically both acidic and basic. The tablets contain Sodium Bicarbonate (a base) and Citric Acid (an acid) which, when mixed with water, react with each other and produce bubbling carbon dioxide. This creates the bubbles we see within the colored fluid.

When the effervescent tablet reacts with the water to make tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide gas, the bubbles attach themselves to the blobs of colored water and cause them to float to the surface. When the bubbles pop, the colored water blobs being denser than the colored gas blobs sink back to the bottom of the bottle. Now, that’s a burst of color!

You just made your own lava lamp!

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