Skink wrote:Information is good and very informative!
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I've had trouble with this, too, so I don't have perfect advice. All you can really do is make a bunch of combinations--as many as you have time and supplies for--and then see if you can ID them later. Practice. When given an unknown, you have to be methodical. Are there two powders? Two granular ones? A mix? If you can identify what consistency your mixture has right off the bat, you're in better shape. Look at the components, identify what you think they might be, and run a few tests to see if you might be right. If you can knock one of them off, you can sometimes treat the second one as a single mixture and just run through the flow chart, keeping in mind that you know the first one and MAY see reactions from it and not the unknown you're trying to ID. Make sense?
There's no easy way to do this, unfortunately.
We've tried mixing different powders together and recording the results but I don't feel like it's very helpful. In the past, we've always had trouble with (powder) powder mixtures. For example, we once had cornstarch/flour & baking soda and cornstarch/flour & gypsum (?). The 2nd mixture was a brighter white than the 1st mixture, which would indicate it's cornstarch & gypsum. However, the first mixture didn't clump in water as flour would have, so it seemed like it was cornstarch. We've compared the colors of baking soda and gypsum before and they're both pretty much the same shade of white. pH didn't help much. I've heard of a way to separate the powders by pouring them out and shaking to separate them, but the powders were so well mixed it looked like a single powder.
