• Question: how is carbon dioxide made?

    Asked by Miss.Giordano to Angela, Claire, Ian, Robert, Sarah on 7 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Ian Cade

      Ian Cade answered on 7 Nov 2014:

      Easily! Just burn some wood/paper etc… and you are making carbon dioxide right there (plus some water vapour too)

      If you mean ‘how can one make solid CO2’ which is perhaps what you are most likely to have ‘seen’… then, I would answer, ‘with only a little more difficulty’.

      Just take your freshly prepared CO2 and cool it down to about -80C and it will condense into a solid (interestingly at atmopheric pressure the CO2 will condense from a gas directly into a solid without first becoming a liquid.)

    • Photo: Angela Stokes

      Angela Stokes answered on 8 Nov 2014:

      Hi BBar1756

      Carbon dioxide is produced when any substance containing carbon is burned. If you burn charcoal in a test tube, the mass of the resulting ash will be less than the weight of the original charcoal, so from that you can work out the mass of CO2 you have produced. If you collect the resulting gas and pipe it through limewater Ca(OH)2, the solution will go from clear to cloudy as you will produce CaCO3 and water. The equation is:
      Ca(OH)2 + CO2 = CaCO3 + H2O.

      As Ian said you can also freeze the gas you made to make CO2 pellets.

      Carbon dioxide is also a product of breathing and fermentation. Plants absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and then return it to the atmosphere through respiration in dark conditions.

      Hope this helps

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