Conclusion This experiment has shown that the sugar levels don’t affect the corrosiveness of Coca-Cola. From the results it is shown that the levels of sugar do not correlate to the speed of which the rust was removed from the nails. For example Coke life with 6.6g/100ml of sugar took on average a similar time to remove rust compared to Diet Coke with 0 grams of sugar.
Discussion
From the results it seems that sugar may actually affect the
corrosiveness of Coca-Cola. The 2 cokes, which had a substantial amount of
sugar, regular Coke with 10.6g /100ml and Vanilla Coke with 10.9/100ml both
corroded the rust in a shorter amount of time than Diet and Zero Coke, which
have no sugar in them. This supports the hypothesis, but after testing Coke life
with 6.6g/100ml of sugar it is disproved. Coke life took roughly the same
amount of time to corrode the rust off the nails as Diet coke, which has 0 grams
of sugar in it which proves the hypothesis wrong. This shows that it isn’t the sugar in the drink that affects
the corrosiveness.
There were two problems with this experiment, evenly removing the coating off each nail and checking how much rust had been removed from the nails. Before creating the rust on the nail the coating needed to be removed off them to allow the nails the rust easier. This was a problem as the process was extremely time consuming and they had to be evenly removed from the all nails. This was overcome with having two people and just removing as much as there was from all the nails. The other problem was checking how much rust had been removed from the nails. This was a problem as Coke is not clear so a hand was used to take the nail out of each cup, inspect it and place it back in. Also to make the results more accurate the nails would have needed to be checked more frequently rather than every 10 minutes. This is because the rust could have been completely removed a minute after checking, but on the results it would have it down 10 minutes later due to checking it 9 minutes later. To improve this experiment rust would have needed to be created more accurately, checking the nails more frequently and being more accurate on checking how much rust had been removed. This could be done by weighing each nail before being rusted and after to see the exact amount of rust created on the nails. This would also be done to check if all the rust had been removed. This experiment is useful because it directly relates to a real life situation. This is so because when you drink any type of Coca-Cola, is makes a large amount of contact with your teeth and can damage the enamel of the tooth. By finding out whether or not the sugar level affects how fast the Coca-cola can corrode the rust, we can find out which of the drinks will be most harmful for our teeth. With the results of my experiment it is clear that all types of Coke will do damage so it is best to stick with water. It is important we find out this information to know what products we consume will affect our health. |