Blue? Potassium chlorate/perchlorate?

[budullewraagh]

funny you mention the jar-in-kettle-of-water method; that's what i used at first. it's great for breaking the match heads apart. after filtering the white powder initially recovered (sulfur), i found that boiling the water out of my beaker was very, very difficult, so i used tongs and held my beaker over my stove (because my stove only goes to 100 celcius).

 

to prove a precipitate powder to be potassium chlorate, try igniting it; it will decompose yielding [math]O_2[/math]

if you want fun, add sulfur and ignite; it should burn with vigor. also, alkaline earth metals make for big reactions.

[Gilded]

Hmm? Should I remove the white powder before boiling it further if it's just sulfur and potassium chlorate/perchlorate forms later?

[budullewraagh]

if you have any sulfur, remove it. if you get white powder after boiling off a bunch of water, keep it; it's the chlorate/perchlorate

[Gilded]

Heh, there's too much dye to tell if it's really white. I think I'm going to burn some of it today and see what happens.

[budullewraagh]

ok. try burning some with sucrose as well. if it goes up like crazy, you have chlorate

[Gilded]

Hmmh, I tried burning some a few minutes ago (without sucrose). It flamed up and burned pretty fast, and crackled a bit, not too pure I guess, but pretty good results when you consider that I didn't crush the match heads and had heavily dyed matches.

 

Edit: Ok, put like 1g of it and 1g basic sugar I found in the kitchen (pure succrose?). Burned like crazy! Lots of smoke and somewhat coloured flames. And it burned a lot longer than without the sugar. Also, it smelled like pancakes or something because of the sugar melting. I recommend this experiment for every young/starting chemist, it's a lot of fun.

[budullewraagh]

the sugar didn't melt; it oxidized. was the color purple/lilac? if so, that's characteristic of the oxidizing.

[Gilded]

Yeah, it did have a purple color (and sorry for saying melt, of course I meant oxidized: otherwise adding sugar would have no use at all. And some of the sugar actually did melt, because I had spilled some near the actual chlorate/sugar mix). I actually got it on video with my digital camera. When I have time I try to convert it to a small and easily viewable form and upload it somewhere. Really nice flames, with just a little KClO3/O4 and succrose.

 

Edit: It also burned quite easily through aluminum foil that was folded over thrice or something.

[budullewraagh]

oh man. save it as a .wmv

it won't be compatible with everything but at least it will load.

[Gilded]

I made it an .avi. I successfully viewed it with DivX player and winamp (Quicktime had some problems, but I have a pretty old version). Now the only problem is that I can't figure out a place where to upload it since geocities free pages' bandwidth is so minimal.

 

Edit: http://www.geocities.com/nabomato/chloratesucrose.jpg <- before and http://www.geocities.com/nabomato/burned.jpg <- after.

[budullewraagh]

open it with windows movie maker and save it as a .wmv

if you do it at low or medium quality you can get a 30 second video that's only a few megs (<4 i think)

try http://www.freewebs.com for 100mb of free hosting

[budullewraagh]

i just looked at the pics and that powder looked a bit sketchy. i take it the chlorate was that yellowish stuff. it should actually be a white powder. you have sulfur in it.

[Gilded]

*Sigh* Freewebs requires a week before you can upload over 750kb. Try http://www.geocities.com/nabomato/kclo3succrose.AVI (if there happens to be bandwidth left)