• Question: what gas does milk turn into?

    Asked by Albert Einstein to Matthew, Andrew on 21 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Andrew McKinley

      Andrew McKinley answered on 21 Nov 2014:

      That’s an interesting question…
      Ok, so most of milk is made of water – that will boil off into steam.
      What you will be left with will be fats, sugars and minerals.
      The fats and sugars can be burned into carbon dioxide and water.
      If you heat to a very high temperature though, you may be able to boil the fats and the lactose sugars, but you will need to be carful for this to happen – most likely in the absence of oxyten to stop them catching fire – and temperatures will be upwards of 300 ºC!
      The minerals, they are essentially salts, so to turn them into gasses will be much more difficult, requiring temperatures of 1000s of degrees!

    • Photo: Matthew Camilleri

      Matthew Camilleri answered on 21 Nov 2014:

      Milk is a liquid made up of a number of different compounds but it is over 90% water. The other components are a mixture of ionic salts and organic compounds such as carboxylic acids, fats and sugars.

      As with any other solution water will become gas at around 110 degrees but then you will need a much higher temperature to get rid of all the other compounds, most of which will decompose to form carbon dioxide and water.

      For compounds having sulfur and nitrogen in them these will normall react with oxygen to form sulfur dioxide (or hydrogen sulfide is the milk goes bad at room temperature) and NOx gases on heating it to temperature over 300 degrees.

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