Australia's Science Forum

How does everyone feel about using potassium dichromate solution? We use it for 12chem wine titrations. In the past I haven't been too worried, as long as the students had been warned that it is nasty, as I figure they only use it for a short period of time during wine EEI's and then never use it again. But the warnings seem to be getting harsher. Even for the 0.04M solution that we use it says things like "fatal if inhaled" "Should not be handled by pregnant women. Women of reproductive age should avoid handling the chemical.". With teenage girls and young female teachers doing this prac, as well as everyone else who can breathe, I am wondering if we should be thinking of stopping using it. The HOD isn't keen to stop as she feels that they need to be able to do the titration to do a decent EEI and I don't know of another way to do the titration using less nasty chemicals. The same titration also uses 40% sulfuric acid which also has some scary warnings on it.

We got rid of all our dichromates about 5 yrs ago due to their carcinogenic nature.

Do you do any wine chemistry?

No we don't sorry.

I just told my HOD about potassium dichromate and we looked at the SDS. The first thing she said was to get rid of it, it's too dangerous.
We don't do wine titrations. We use HCl and NaOH for our titrations.

I was just wondering if anyone used dichromate to illustrate the reactivity of primary v secondary v tertiary alcohol? It seems odd that a school lab would be without dichromate.
Also rather than doing esterification prac, we often do the reverse and recover the carboxylic acid and alcohol - dichromate once again used to confirm the presence of the primary alcohol as one of the decomposition products.
And what do you use to synthesise aldehydes?