Creative Capillary Action

 Hey Guys! Welcome Back!

This week we had another science report and experiment. Our teacher accidentally knocked over our experiment so my friend Jayde and I had to start again. But it's ok because we got a bigger container to fit it in. Here's my report:

Capillary Action

Questions:

How high can the liquid go up a stalk of celery?

Research Summary:

Ganesha, the Indian god, would get left milk at her shrine. But a man once tried to feed

Ganesha and found that the milk had disappeared. The scientists thought it was a celestial

intervention so they went to test their hypothesis and it turned out to be true, and it was capillary

action that made it happen.

The milk would flow through narrow cracks, with no assistance from an external force. So it

turned out that Ganesha was drinking the milk the whole time.

The science behind it is the Capillary action. Water can move up narrow cracks, tubes, straws

etc. You would expect gravity to pull it down but the adhesion, cohesion and surface tension

helps it climb up the side of the straw.

Hypothesis

I think that the celery will fade a bit as the liquid goes up.

Materials:

Water, red food colouring, beaker, sprite bottle and celery.

Procedure:

1. First, we got a beaker and filled it up with water (and added red dye).

2. Then we got a full stem of celery, marked it with a distance of 5cm each and then put it in the

water.

3. (Mr G knocked it over, so we had to start again) So we got a sprite bottle and cut the top off,

then filled it with the water and put the celery in.

4. We then observed and measured how far it went and how many days it took to get to that height.

Observations/Results:

Tests	Height	Speed
Observations	When we went to measure it we had found that the water had gone up to the leaves. We could tell by a red colour that was on the leaves, that looked kind of like veins. The height it went up to was 50cm.	We forgot to check on Friday and then couldn’t on Saturday and Sunday. So we checked on Monday which was the fourth day so it reached the leaves on the fourth day. Although since we didn’t check on the other days it could have reached the leaves earlier.

Discussion:

When we checked the celery stalk had faded a little bit but not that much, and when it got to the

top the leaves had thin lines of red in them like veins. I thought it was quite interesting how the

red water got up to the top in four days.

We couldn’t measure how far the liquid went day by day so we measured how far it went on the

fourth day and it had gone 50cm. I wasn’t that surprised that it went to the top in four days.

Conclusion:

I have learnt that capillary action can actually go pretty fast and high… well faster and higher than I expected. After doing this with celery I wondered what else it could go up and if it could go any higher than 50cm in four days… although we’d need it to be quite high.

Sorry but we don't have any pictures of this experiment :(

Have you done an experiment with a... fruit? vegetable? plant?

So that's it folks, See you next time! :3