Why do sugar granules dissolve faster in liquids when you stir them with a spoon, than just leaving it to sit?
In: Chemistry
Think of a drop of food dye getting put in a cup of water. You can see the color floating around in the water, but there are still parts of the water that don’t have dye in them. Stirring the water helps push the dye into the parts of the water that don’t have dye yet, and once the water is mixed with dye you can’t un-stir it back into water and dye.
Sugar works in a similar way, except it starts out as solid crystals instead of a liquid. Water molecules have space between them that the sugar molecules can hide in. Stirring the water helps evenly distribute the sugar to all these hiding places.
Once the space between the molecules is all taken up by sugar, you can’t dissolve any more sugar and its called a saturated liquid. No matter how much you stir after saturation, there will always be sugar that can’t dissolve because there’s no more room to hide. Warming the water can make it able to dissolve more sugar because warm things expand. Warm things expanding is because the space between the molecules gets bigger, which means there’s more space between the molecules for sugar to hide and more can be dissolved.
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