What happens to volume of water when sugar is added

This is something that's been bugging me for a while and I haven't had much luck finding an answer, so hopefully some of the smart people on this sub can help!

What I know (correct me if I'm wrong!) is that if you add a small amount of sugar to water, the sugar molecules will actually occupy the inter-molecular space between water molecules and thus the volume of the solution will not increase, only density increases.

However, if you continue to add sugar, eventually there wont be inter-molecular space left for the sugar to fill, so the volume of the solution will start to increase as you add more sugar.

My obvious question is, at what point does this shift occur? 10g sugar/100ml? Higher? Lower?

Answer

What happens to volume of water when sugar is added
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Hint: The volume of any mixture is ideally the sum of the volumes of the individual constituents of the mixture. But such an addition of volumes is observed only when there is no phase change involved and the constituents do not interact with one another. The forces of attraction or repulsion between the particles can cause significant changes in the total volume.

Complete answer:

When sugar is mixed with water, a clear solution is obtained due to the formation of a homogenous solution between sugar and water. The sugar granules are small in size and dissociate or get fragmented further upon dissolution. Water present in its liquid state has wide empty spaces in between its molecules. It is only due to these spaces that liquids have a tendency to flow and the flexibility to change their shapes according to the containers. When sugar particles evenly spread themselves throughout the bulk volume of water, they gradually occupy and fit inside the empty spaces present between its molecules. This process is responsible for the homogenous character of the solution. Since the sugar particles do not occupy any new spaces (that aren't already covered by water), the volume of the solution remains unchanged.

Hence, the correct option is (c) that the water level remains the same on adding sugar.

Note:

The case discussed above is an ideal case but if excess sugar is added to a limited amount of water, the empty spaces present in between water molecules would eventually fill up and the solution will become saturated. Addition of sugar beyond the saturation point would lead to an increase in the water level.

The sugar does not boil off, so all the sugar you added is still there. Whether you can just add more water to the same line or not depends on how you measured the sugar in the first place.

The problem, of course, is that one cup of sugar plus one cup of water does not make two cups of sugar water—the volume will be much less once the sugar and water mix. There are two effects at work here. First, a cup of sugar has a lot of empty space in between the sugar grains, and water can fill up that space (think about adding water to a full cup of sugar; you could add quite a bit before it started to overflow).

Second, when the sugar dissolves into individual molecules, the sugar and water molecules can get much closer together, further decreasing the total volume. We know how this works for sugar and water, but predicting exactly what happens when any substance dissolves into another is actually a complicated topic, and chemists are still learning how to model it and understand it.

So, if you originally measured the volume of the water with the sugar dissolved in it, you can just add water back to the original volume. If not, it will be much harder to get a predictable result.

Here's another option: instead of using volume to figure out how much water to add, you could use weight. You would need a kitchen scale to do this. I assume you know how much sugar you added, either in volume (cups) or weight (grams). If you used volume, convert it to weight: 1 cup of white sugar is about 200 grams.

Weigh the remaining solution. You'll have to pour it out of the original container to do this, unless you happen to know the weight of the pot. Since all the sugar is still there, if the solution weighs more than just the sugar, the extra weight is water. You can take that extra water weight, convert it to a volume if you want (1 cup of water is about 225 grams), and figure out how much more water you need to add to reach the desired ratio.

Rebecca H.


(published on 08/04/2016)

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Volume will first increase and then decrease.

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Volume will remain constant.

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When sugar is dissolved in water, the volume of the water increases, but not by much. Adding equal volumes of sugar and water together does not double the volume of the water, due to the properties of solutions.

The molecules in liquids have space between them. The molecules of sugar and water in solution are much more concentrated than the molecules of water alone. When sugar dissolves in water, the sugar molecules take up space between the water molecules. The mass of the total solution equals the mass of its components, so sugar water is more dense than pure water.