how does a shaken can of soda lose its pressure over time, if its sealed?
In: Chemistry
Containers aren’t perfectly sealed. The gas will slowly escape through pores in the container over time. This is actually used intentionally in several industries. Hydrogen, for example, is a notoriously hard gas to store, because it’s very good at simply passing through any container you store it in to escape. Seeing this escape rate change can tell us that there is a breach of some sort in the container, which is very helpful in pipelines and sealed circulation systems. This gas escaping happens all the time, even without shaking the bottle. But for the purposes of a bottle of soda, for example, this takes months or years to occur and notably make the drink go “flat” even before opening it.
To everyone talking about pressure increasing when you shake a bottle, [that is definitely not true](https://youtu.be/K-Fc08X56R0?t=40s) and what you’re instead thinking of for that foaming is nucleation sites created when you shake the bottle. You can hit the side of a bottle after shaking it to disrupt the nucleation sites attached to the edge of the bottle to let them re-settle at the top of the liquid, minimizing that foamy explosion.
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