Sugar Crystals

During my holiday, I spend some of my time building a sugar crystal. After this experiment, I realised that making sugar crystals was not as easy as it looks.

I made a few different experiments, before finally coming to some of the details. I used 1 jar of water to 3 jar of sugar. This is to allow the sugar solution to be saturated.

Materials

As follows are the steps:

1. Pour in the jar of water into a pot.
2. Heat up the pot. Wait for the water to start to boil.
3. Start to pour the sugar slowly into the pot while stirring.
4. After all the sugar was poured, turn off the gas.
5. Pour the solution into a Jar.
6. Put a string into a Jar. 

The string that I used was covered with a some sugar, which acts as the seed crystal to encourage growth of my sugar crystal.

As follows are a few video of parts of my experiment.

In this video, I pour the sugar and stir the solution.

Here, I poured the solution into the jar.

This video is a short, showing me putting the string into the jar. I put the string into the jar. I had to make sure that the string did not touch the sides.

Not only this "Perfect" Solution, I had also come up with a few other set-ups to see which one works the best. One, is the solution, where I had covered the jar containing the solution. The sugar crystals did not form that lot as compared to the set up with the jar open. 

The sugar crystal in the bottle without cover

However, the bottle which was uncovered gave better results.

Crystals from uncovered Bottle (1)

Crystals from uncovered Bottle (2)

The Original Bottle was like that, with the bottle filled with 1 crystal.

I could not lift the crystal by the string! However, I was quite sure that was 1 crystal. Then, I decided to break the vase so that at least a crystal can come out. Yes, it did. However, it was broken. The biggest piece was 79.5g, far away from the top crystal (as of my writing) at 287g. 3 times! I believe that that person must have used a big bottle to come up with such an large one. However, through this experiment, I realised how hard it was to come up with a sugar crystal like that, and how much effort was required to come up with one.

As follows are just some photos from my process of making crystals. :)

Left: Day 1    Right: Day 4
(Both bottles are meant to be uncovered)

Evaporation Set-up Starting

The many multiple crystals in the End of the evaporation set-up