Oscillating Chemical Reaction

By Alex in Science & Tech on Mar 2, 2008 at 3:22 pm

In this video clip at Centripetal Notion blog, you’ll see a neat example of an oscillating chemical reaction:

The Briggs-Rauscher oscillating reaction is one of a small number of known oscillating chemical reactions. It is especially well suited for demonstration purposes because of its visually striking color changes: the freshly prepared colorless solution slowly turns an amber color, suddenly changing to a very dark blue. This slowly fades to colorless and the process repeats, about ten times in the most popular formulation, before ending as a dark blue liquid smelling strongly of iodine.

Link [embedded YouTube]


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  1. tballou
    Mar 2nd, 2008 at 9:37 pm

    This is so cool! I actually saw this when I was in high school around 1977 during a field trip to the Chemistry Dept at the Univ. of South Carolina. The Youtube link says this reaction was discovered by a couple of high school chem teachers during the ’70s. Figures a bunch of science geeks would use it to show of to a bunch of high school kids!

  2. meghan
    Mar 2nd, 2008 at 11:33 pm

    We did that in inorganic chem. Was fun until the entire lab stank of iodine.

  3. Paul
    Mar 3rd, 2008 at 12:03 pm

    I hated Chem in college except for the lab.


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