Title and Abstract

Project Title:

Investigation of the sugar concentration of carbonated drinks using a hollow prism.

Dietary sugar intake has been a popular topic in scientific research in recent years. Doctors had warned people of the dangers of excessive sugar intake in our diet. The government of Singapore has also raised sugar taxes to discourage singaporeans from consuming sugar. However, we find that young people like us, are still very attached to sugary drinks. With this in mind, we are interested to find out how much sugar is in our carbonated sugary drinks. There are many methods to measure the amount of sugar in our drinks. The Hollow Prism method is one of them.

The aim of our research is to find out how reliable is the Hollow Prism method in the investigation of sugar concentration in carbonated drinks.  With the results we can then conclude if this method is accurate ,comparing with the data on the package information.

We use a hollow prism and laser pointer to find out the sugar concentration in different carbonated sugary drinks by measuring the solution's index of refraction according to Snell’s Law.(Kieran S. Mital, 2010) The amount of sugar in the sugar in the sugary drinks will affect how the laser refracts off the hollow prism.

We tested 6 different sugary carbonated drinks (Coke, Rootbeer, Sprite, Jus Plus, Teazzle and Schweppes dry ginger ale), poured it into a hollow prism and shone a laser through it. With our hypothesis, sugary carbonated drinks with higher sugar levels should cause the laser to end up further away from the control point (plain tap water) than sugary carbonated drinks with a lower sugar level.

These are our results: Rootbeer has 11.7g of sugar, Coke has 10g of sugar, juz plus has 10g of sugar, schweppe has 8.8g of sugar, teazzle has 7.5g of sugar and sprite has 6.3g of sugar. These results closely resonate with the sugar content printed on the packaging. Therefore we can conclude that the hollow prism method is accurate and we can use this method to test for sugar levels in different drinks like coffees or milk teas. with the results, we can also find out which coffee chain coffee contains less sugar and which chain is healthier  for you.