  Popcorn is an extremely popular snack food in the world today. Thermodynamics
can be used to analyze how popcorn is produced. By treating the popping
mechanism of the corn as a thermodynamic expansion, a method of increasing the
volume or size of a kernel of popcorn can be studied. By lowering the pressure
surrounding the unpopped kernel, one can use a thermodynamic argument to show
that the expanded volume of the kernel when it pops must increase. In this
project, a variety of experiments are run to test the validity of this theory.
The results show that there is a significant increase in the average kernel
size when the pressure of the surroundings is reduced.
