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
Think of a bullet. A bullet contains a modern version of black powder. Upon ignition it converts all the powder into gas, which propels the bullet forward really fast because the gas takes up way more room than the powder creating gas pressure. In the end it’s gas pressure that fires a bullet.
During fermentation basically the same process happens, just much slower. But the gas pressure will keep on rising as long as the fermentation runs.
So summarized gas (CO2) takes up WAY more space than the liquids and solids it’s made from.
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