[breslinca]

Is there a way to give a simple yes/no visual strip indicator, other than pH paper, for a liquid that contains sugar?  Water?  Alcohol?

[Arkcon]

Hmmm .. so you want to make an indicator paper, not for pH, but instead for ...

sugar?  Not likely, that is two broad a definition.

water?  Yes, there is a common reagent for detecting moisture with a color change

alcohol?  Again, like sugar, definition is too broad.  If you mean just ethanol, maybe, but you couldn't easily differentiate from say, isopropanol.

[fledarmus]

This might be one place to start looking...

http://www.indigo.com/test-strips/test-strips.html

[breslinca]

Thank you.

Hmmm .. so you want to make an indicator paper, not for pH, but instead for ...

sugar?  Not likely, that is two broad a definition.

water?  Yes, there is a common reagent for detecting moisture with a color change

alcohol?  Again, like sugar, definition is too broad.  If you mean just ethanol, maybe, but you couldn't easily differentiate from say, isopropanol.

[breslinca]

[Thank you.
quote author=fledarmus link=topic=53326.msg196244#msg196244 date=1322618295]
This might be one place to start looking...

http://www.indigo.com/test-strips/test-strips.html


[/quote]

[zaphraud]

Is there a way to give a simple yes/no visual strip indicator, other than pH paper, for a liquid that contains sugar?  Water?  Alcohol?

No idea if this will actually work (fun!) but have you tried glucose test strips like diabetics use?

Probably you will have to come up with something to dilute the sample to be tested into an acceptable range; a range more like the strip can detect. Also, no idea just how specific these are - buy and extract some glucose tablets too, if you can't just get glucose (many health food shops stock crystal fructose, another possible "test strip agonist" to explore!) in order to determine the specificity of the blood glucose strips. You might also want to explore using medical saline instead of water to dilute it - no idea if that will help or not.

If the strip still doesn't work, even with glucose in either saline or water at the right concentrations, then it requires something in the blood to do its job, and you will have to make a very difficult decision about how much you want to run that test... 

[Stepan]

Is there a way to give a simple yes/no visual strip indicator, other than pH paper, for a liquid that contains sugar?  Water?  Alcohol?

It is possible to make such indicators for some applications:
Sugar in DI Water - possible
Alcohol in DI water - possible
Water in gasoline - possible
and so on.