Chem Experiment Assistance

[adenxin]

Hello. I attempted to do the experiment which I have seen many times where sulfuric acid reacts with sugar and makes a black solid and some smoke. We used about 4M H2SO4 which we got from a car battery, and the reaction did not work. Next we added Baking Soda to the mix in order to see if that would do anything.

When adding the baking Soda I hypothesized that it would bubble and maybe bubble on bottom causing the gas to try to escape and make it puff up some, but instead it created a white sticky foam which was still acidic.

I wanted to ask if anybody knew what could have gone wrong with the initial reaction, and if anybody knew what the white foam may have been.

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[oz93666]

To get the sugar reaction you need very strong sulphuric acid... 98%pure ...it doesn't come any stronger ...you might be able to find this in battery supply shops ... the big shops buy acid very concentrated and dilute it down and put it in lead acid batteries .. tell them why you want it , they might help ..very dangerous stuff...

Adding baking soda you get a totally different reaction ...carbon dioxide gas... the foam is probably the unreacted baking soda and the CO2 bubbles .