Home Chemistry Forensics, White powder

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 Flo

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.  Pipette
2.  Vinegar
3.  Iodine

Steps

1. Fold cardboard to 4.
2. Write 4 Chemicals on a 4 folded box. 
3. Put 4  Chemicals on 4 folded box.
4. Pure Iodine in three par of each.

Findings:

	Sugar	Salt	Baking Soda	Cornflour
Appearance	A Softer white	Harder white	white	soft
Texture	Hard, Soft? Wetish	Hard, Soft?	hard	smooth
Smell	Sweet	Salty	Smoothe	dust
Iodine	Darker orange colour	Turned darker and wet	made it turn orange as well	made it turned into a dark and  it has a bit of pink colour
Water	Silky white	Silky water	just wet	slimy
Vinegar	White Wet	wet	made it bubbly	wet

Conclusion: Today I learned how or what to tell the difference between the powders by using different liquids and these three liquids is Iodine, Vinegar & water they all turned different colours and this is why I & a few friends could tell what the mystery powder was,

it was a good lesson. We were given a blackboard for each 4 powder to put it on the black cardboard. My group folded the black cardboard into four squares to put it on each powder.