Woosh Bottle Analysis

For my group’s project we changed the size of the woosh bottles to .5, 1, and 2 liter bottles. I learned that the size of the bottle strongly affects how far the bottle will travel. The larger the bottle, the farther it travelled. I learned that the chemical reactions in the bottle with the ethanol and the flame creates energy which propels the rocket. The ethanol is also ‘absorbed’ by the fire of the match. If the bottle was larger, it was covered in more ethanol and had more oxygen in it, which would create a larger reaction and produce more energy. When ethanol and oxygen are reacted it is called a combustion the chemical equation is C2H5OH + 3O3 = 2CO2 + 3H2O. This tells me that when the ethanol and oxygen reacted, carbon dioxide and water …show more content…
We decided to make a rocket out of it and we questioned how the size of the bottle would affect the distance that it travelled. We began our project by attempting to light our bottle outside, which we failed to do because we could not light the match. We then tried to light it indoors, but it would not light again. We then found out that the ethanol that we were using was 50% ethanol, and not 100% ethanol like we presumed. Through the process of science, we decided to fix this mistake, and then the rocket worked well. We also encountered some other difficulties along the way, like the rocket hitting the doorways. My group decided to do each part of the experiment multiple times to get accurate data. We learned that trial and error is the best way to go about the with the process of science. Our results showed that the larger the bottle the farther it …show more content…
This prevented the woosh bottle from lighting both indoors and outdoors. We also had trouble lighting the woosh bottle outdoors because at first we could not light the match because the wind kept blowing it out, but then when we used a back up lighter, the woosh bottle would not light either. Because of this, we decided to light all of our woosh bottles indoors. At times when we lit the woosh bottles indoors, it would not light, but it would melt the bottle, preventing us to use the same bottle again, so we had to get more bottles. The doorways and chairs in the room were also large problems because are woosh bottles would continuously run into the doorways skewing our data and preventing the woosh bottle from travelling farther. We would not need to address these problems specifically in future projects, but the problems did help show us to keep trying until we get what we want to