Forensic science

What is that white powder?

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 learn about the makeup of different white powders.

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.   Water

2.  cornflour

3.  sugar

4.  salt

5.  baking soda

6.  Iodine  

7.  Vinegar

Steps

1.  Get the a black sheet of paper.

2.  Rule 2 lines to dived the sheet into 4.

3.  Put cornflour, sugar, salt and baking soda separated in the different corners.

4.  Dived each different powder into 3. 

5.  add different liquids to each of these piles.

6.  Record what happend.

Findings:

	Sugar	Salt	Baking Soda	Cornflour
Appearance	Small	Very Small	Sandy	Chunky
Texture	Sharp	Sharp	Soft	Soft
Smell	Sea Salt	Salty	dentist office	Corn
Iodine	Murged	Spread	Dissolve	Stayed Liquid
Water	Soaked in	Dissolved	Transformed	Dissolved
Vinegar	Spread	Darker	Transformed	Dissolved

Write a paragraph about your findings.

I found that the salt and the sugar were very small and very rough to touch and the others were soft and some of the smells really surprised me. Also the softer powder had the same results and the other 2 were very different.

Making Sherbet

Once you have completed your blog and cleaned up all your equipment you can make sherbet.

Using the following recipe you can make sherbet.

Sherbet recipe

Recipe: 

1 tsp of powdered drink crystals (eg refresh)
1/4 tsp citric acid
1/2 tsp icing sugar
1/4 tsp -baking soda.
Put all ingredients into a zip lock bag, stir, and enjoy.

At this point we were going to make sherbet however I did not take part in this bit of the experiment.  

Conclusion

Different powders have different reactions and feel very different however not all powder are different some can be almost identical in more ways than one.