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
Imagine you are inside a five cubic foot room. Inside this room with you is a two cubic foot box. Inside that box is a slightly smaller box, with a slightly smaller box inside that, and a smaller box inside that, etc.
You open the first box and take the smaller box out. Then you open that one and take the smaller box out. How long until you’re so smushed that you can’t move?
No additional matter entered the room, you just moved around the stuff that’s already there.
That’s basically how fermentation works. Sugars are pretty densely packed, and bacteria break those down into unpacked gasses. Those unpacked gasses begin to take up a bunch of space until there’s no more space to take up.
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