White powder test

Today you will be a Forensic Chemist. 

A bag of white powder has been confiscated by the airport customs.  You need to find out what white powder it is?

Aim: To see what different powders and liquids react in different ways / also to find out what the white powder is.

There are  a number of different white powders in our everyday life. Some of these are harmful and others are not. Test the four white powders listed to see which one has been found at the airport.

Here are some examples of everyday kitchen white powders.

Flour, Cornflour, Sugar, Salt, Baking Soda, Baking Powder, Icing Sugar, Tartaric Acid

Citric Acid, Gluten Free flour

You will be given a small amount of 4 white powders on your cardboard. On the black cardboard using a magnifying glass look at the powders.

Look at them under your magnifying glass and record what you see. 

These are the four powders we will be using. Upload a photo of each powder. 

1.  Cornflour
2.  Baking Soda
3.  Salt
4.  Sugar 

Before you add the iodine, vinegar or water you will need to divide each powder into 3.

Materials

1.  Black cardboard
2.  vinegar
3.  water
4.  iodine
5.  salt
6.  sugar
7. cornflour
8. baking soda
9.pipette

Steps

1. Fold the cardboard in four
2. Get a little bit of the salt, baking soda,sugar and cornflower and add a little bit of every thing and put one powder in each four square's. make sure that the powders are not touching.
3. One you have add in the powders you than have to divide them into quarters
5. After you have got the vinegar, water and iodine you then add 3 drops into one quarter and watch it work its way
6. Than you just watch and see what happens.
The names of the powders are called, Sugar, salt, baking soda and corn flower.
All of them had  different reaction.

Findings:

	Sugar	Salt	Baking Soda	Cornflour
Appearance	white	white	white	white
Texture	grainy/big	grainy/medium	small	small
Smell	nothing	nothing	nothing	nothing
Iodine	still wet/darker	went lighter	went hard	turned black/hard
Water	soggy absorbs	wasn't so soggy	didn't really make a reaction.	went hard .
Vinegar	Didn't do  reaction	absorbs	big bubbles	went hard

Write a paragraph about your findings.

All of the powders were the colour white. With the powders being white I think that it was easy to see the colours and how they react. When we were looking at the powders some of them were big and small and some in between for the grains. The biggest one would of had to be the sugar. All of the powders smelled like nothing, they didn't have any smell to them. The iodine had lots of different results and reactions.

At the end we got to do a mystery powder. The powder was the baking soda. The reason why I thought it was the baking soda was because it wasn't grainy and it wasn't soft like the cornflour so that's why I thought that it was the baking soda.

Iodine:
Take cornflower for a example : When we added in the iodine into the corn flower it made it hard and the colour went a dark and rich black
Here's another example: When we added in the iodine for the salt, the iodine went a light brown maybe even caramel colour. When we added it into the cornflour and baking soda it didn't do any reaction.

Water:
The water on all of them had a really weird reaction. With the water I didn't think that it would have a reaction to it. When we added the water onto the sugar it went all soggy and gross. When we added it into the salt it went soggy but not as soggy and it did with the sugar. With the baking soda it didn't have any reaction to it at all. I was hoping that it did but it had nothing. Last one for the water is the cornflour. I wasn't expecting this to happen to it but when we added in the water to the cornflour it went hard and went to like a milky white colour. 

Vinegar:
When we added the vinegar into the sugar it had no reaction to it. it did nothing except absorb the sugar. That was it. The salt did the same thing as it did with the sugar. Had no reaction to it and only absorbs it. When we added it into the baking soda it started to fizz and make bubbles. The last one now is the cornflour. When we added it in it did the same thing as it did with the water. It went hard and made a milky colour.


Over all I really enjoyed doing this experiment and would love to do it again just with different powders and maybe even liquids.

Thank you for reading this blog post. I know it was long but that's just how I sometimes like it. Don't forget to comment and give feedback.