Don’t try this at home! Egg-splosions can be hard to crack!
Our team includes chemists and forensic engineers who are highly trained and skilled in dealing with flammable items and the necessary safety precautions. Find out how they created an exploding egg.Â
- Carefully poke a hole in each end of a raw egg and shake or blow its contents out.
- With safety glasses on, mix water with sodium hydroxide in a glass container—this can be found in caustic soda cleaning powders.
- Next, add aluminium foil.
- The sodium hydroxide reacts with the aluminium to form flammable hydrogen gas.
- Place your hollow egg on top of the glass, covering its top opening, so the hydrogen can become trapped inside the egg.
- Safely remove the reactive mixture before setting the egg somewhere that oxygen can now mix with the hydrogen inside it.
- Light the escaping hydrogen gas to see an 'egg-splosion'!
To find out how chemists and forensic engineers investigate both explosions and implosions in the real world view our expertise pages on fire and explosion.
