Home Chemistry: Forensics? The White Powders

Today you will be a Forensic Chemist. 

A bag of white powder has been confiscated by 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.

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. 

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.  Paper/cardboard
3.  Iodine

Steps

1. Fold the piece of cardboard/paper into 4.
2. Write 4 Chemicals on the 4 folded squares. 
3. Put 4  Chemicals on 4 folded squares and split them into 3.
4. 3 drops of Iodine/Water/Vinegar into a third of each chemical

Findings:

	Sugar	Salt	Baking Soda	Cornflour
Appearance	A light white	Harder white	White	Soft
Texture	Hard, Soft? Wetish	Hard, Soft?	Hard	Smoothish
Smell	Sweet	Salty	Smoothe	Dusty
Iodine	Darker orange color	Turned darker and wet	made it turn orange as well	Made a dark purple and tiny bit of pink.
Water	Silky white	Silky water	Wet	Slim, wet
Vinegar	White Wet	wet	Fixed up	Rolled of could not get wet.

Conclusion: Today I learned about what happens to the four powders when the powders have interfered with the chemicals, Water, Vinegar & Iodine. and how to tell is one powder is the other for ( Example: Laying out powder and then putting a liquid like Iodine, Vinegar or water on it one by one and seeing what the outcome is, and then see what type of powder it is that will change differently, This is basically what we did for experimenting on white powders, We tried to tell what powder was which, How exactly? with some liquids...