ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Evolved gas analysis

Have you ever made something in the kitchen, like a cake or cookies? When you mix all the ingredients together and put them in the oven, they start to change and turn into something new. This is kind of like what happens with chemicals and materials when they change, too.

When scientists want to try to understand how a material changes, they might use something called "evolved gas analysis." This is just a fancy way of saying that they study the gas that comes off of a material when it changes.

Imagine you have a piece of plastic that you want to study. First, you would heat it up to a really high temperature. This would cause some of the plastic to turn into gas and come off of the material.

Then, scientists would use special equipment to try to figure out what kind of gas it is and what elements it contains. This can help them understand how the plastic is changing and what might be happening to it.

So, evolved gas analysis is just a way for scientists to study materials by looking at the gas that comes off of them when they change. It's kind of like baking a cake and seeing how the ingredients change as they cook!