Over at The Backyard Scientist, they wanted to know what would happen if you poured molten aluminum into a watermelon. The results were surprising. And very cool.
I guess the aluminum flowed into the more watery, less dense cavities inside the melon where the water quickly cooled the metal before it could cook its way into the denser parts of the fruit.
Warning: This is, of course, potentially very dangerous. Just because their watermelon didn’t explode doesn’t mean that such a potential doesn’t exist. I would advise against actually attempting this. As my friend Kaden Harris says: “You cannot imagine the pain of a liquid metal burn.”
8 thoughts on “What Happens When You Pour Molten Aluminum into a Watermelon?”
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I’m shocked that it didn’t explode. When you add water to a vat of molten aluminum the intense heat can separate the hydrogen & oxygen bond of the water creating gases that explode. I guess in this case there was enough watermelon mass to cool the aluminum before that happened. Silly thing to do though, especially in tennis shoes.
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You are correct, skeptical stranger. I did a bit more looking into this and my understanding needed an update. Still though, mixing water & molten metal is very capable of causing explosions.
So the aluminum followed the natural cavities in the watermelon and made a cast. Imagine that. For some reason I didn’t expect it to explode. I would have been more surprised if it had.
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You have only done half the experiment. The really interesting stuff is now developing a mathematical formula that describes the distribution of the seeds. How are the seeds distributed and why are they distributed in that pattern? Are there efficiencies relating to seed distribution? Does the distribution relate to ant hill distribution.