I’ve seen people drop milk and other drinks and often the bottle opens up or bursts. I’ve also noticed that the less liquid there is, it doesn’t pop open. This applying from any force from throwing and dropping the bottles. What exactly causes this to happen?
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To bounce, the bottle must change shape to absorb the energy of the impact and then return to its original shape afterward.
To explode, it must change shape in such a way as to no longer hold whatever’s inside of it (it must break). This usually happens when it changes shape *too much* and the just plastic gives up.
First, filling a bottle with liquid makes it *way* heavier. That means it has lots and lots more energy to absorb when it lands.
Second, while water cannot be squished, air *can*. When the bottle lands, the squishing of the air can hold some of the energy, reducing how much the plastic has to deal with.
Liquids are uncompressible. When an empty plastic bottle hits something, the gas inside the bottle acts like a spring and it compresses. The volume of the bottle decreases as the bottle hits absorbing the energy of the fall. When a liquid filled bottle hits the ground the energy can’t be absorbed by the contents of the bottle since liquids cannot be compressed. The mass of a liquid filled bottle is also significantly higher so the impact has much more energy. The energy goes into the liquid, since it’s not compressible, it transfers taht energy to the bottle which makes it explode
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