I’m thinking of like when you bottle wine that’s still fermenting, and it explodes. I understand that the fermentation process raises the air pressure inside the bottle. What I *don’t* understand is how? When you pump air into a balloon, the air pressure rises because there are *more* air molecules entering the balloon.
With wine in a bottle, you have a fixed amount of matter at a certain temperature. I don’t understand how fermentation could increase air pressure in a closed system?
In: Physics
Ever eat a bunch of cabbage and cheese and spend the night farting? You’re converting dense matter into gas, and potentially a lot of it. Bacteria do the same thing – eat a bunch of sugars and fart it out as gas. The air pressure increases because they convert the sugar (a big chain of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen atoms) and into co2 and alcohol (a smaller chain of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms). The total matter doesn’t change, but what was a big solid is now a smaller liquid plus a gas.
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