[daisychain]

So I have to come up with an experiment to investigate any aspect of organic chemistry and I thought I would test how long it takes for bromine water to decolorize cyclohexene. My teacher said that was fine, but I need quantitative data to obtain and she told me I need an independent variable. And I suggested things that affect reactions e.g. temperature, concentration, particle size. She said I could do temperature.
However, I know that cyclohexene is flammable.. but I need to vary and change the temperature and I have to do some trialling. Usually the cyclohexene is kept in the fume cupboard, but will I be able to take it out of the fume cupboard? Can I heat the cyclohexene up in a water bath or will that result in a total disaster?  Please suggest some ways I can vary the temperature safely please? Or maybe some ideas that will affect cyclohexene so I will have different data when it comes to decolorizing it.

Thank you so much! 

[Hunter2]

Everything has done under the hood, why take out?  You can use a reflux cooler on top of of your round flask. Heating can be done with a water bath or also normal heater if you control the temperature. But one problem I see is, that the bromine water solution will not mix with the cyclohexene. Better is to have the bromine dissolved in chloroform or something similar.

[Archer]

Also don't forget that temperature goes both ways, i.e. you can cool it too. There are many combinations of coolant + additive to provide a range of sub-room temperature conditions.

[opsomath]

I just want to say that this reaction is *very fast* at room temperature. Unless you have an instrument set up for kinetics measurements you may struggle. The obvious solution is to go cold. In general, it is safer and easier to make things cold than to make them hot. You can get several well-defined temperature points using a thermocouple and some freezing mixtures, as listed here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_bath

Alternatively, you can use a less reactive alkene.