So generally you can refill tea bags with hot water several times before the concentration of the tea bags becomes too low to be worth the trouble of filling it up again. So the question is - what equilibrium process prevents the water from becoming dissolved with more tea? Does the water get "saturated" with the tea powder? (can tea powder really be "dissolved?") And if you add two tea bags into the cup, do you shift the equilibrium direction or not? If water gets saturated by tea powder, then I think it wouldn't. but if it was merely a mass exchange process (similar to diffusion), then I would predict that it would.
GCT
May25-08, 10:35 PM
Please be a bit more specific with your question - each tea bag contains a certain amount of tea ingredient ; you're essentially going to extract the tea bag of the chemical compounds which make up the tea ingredient with each time it is immersed in the water.
Simfish
May26-08, 06:08 AM
Please be a bit more specific with your question - each tea bag contains a certain amount of tea ingredient ; you're essentially going to extract the tea bag of the chemical compounds which make up the tea ingredient with each time it is immersed in the water.
Ah yes, each of the tea ingredients. But do all of them work the same way? (as in, are ALL of them dissolvable into the water - just with different rates of dissolvation?)
GCT
May26-08, 01:45 PM
Yeah all of them should have different rates of dissolution in water but these should not differ greatly what matters is the actual degrees of solubility - all those that are not dissolved remain in the tea bag of course.