Can water explode if heated in the microwave?

Project title:
Can water explode if heated in the microwave?
Elementary school
None

Hypothesis:

Most people heat water in the microwave when makeing things like hot chocolate and instant coffee, without ever haveing any difficulty. I don't believe it will explode.

Materials:

2 clean cups
tap water
distilled water
microwave
sugar cube or tea bag

The Procedure:

Fill one cup with tap water, and the other with distilled water. Place in microwave and heat until tap water boils, distilled water will not boil, because the impurities have been removed. Remove cups of hot water using extreme caution, then place a sugar cube in both cups.

Results:

The tap water should not be effected because of the impurities in the water caused it to just boil, then release steam, but the distilled water did not boil, but rather "super heated" and built up pressure, when the distilled super heated water is disturbed it should cause an "explosion." Very dangerous, expecially since we live in the day of bottled water.


Sonya's picture
Score: 0
 0 vote(s)
Comments for this science project
Sonya's picture

Comment #958: We tried this and was unable

Submitted by Sonya on March 7, 2006 - 7:06am
In response to the main content
Usefulness: unknown

We tried this and was unable to get it to work. I saw this experiment on Myth Busters, and they did make the water "explode". I am not sure what we did different, buth the distilled water did boil,instead of "super heating." Maybe the water we bought did have some impurities, we did try different kind of cups, but were still unable to do it.

Copyright (C) 2005 Sciencehound.com All Rights Reserved
Science Fair Projects at ScienceHound.com