Introduction
As I said in my last post I would describe how to get glycerine from salting it out of a saponifacation reaction. This process is by no means efficient nor is it very strict in the exact concentrations used. If looking for high quality glycerol it will be cheaper and easier to just buy it from a drug store/pharmacy or grocery store.
Materials
Sodium Hydroxide (available at most hardware stores)
Vegetable or Cooking oil (I tested this using olive oil)
Sodium Chloride (table salt)
Water (tap water works)
Process
In a large crockpot add 1000g of your oil of choice. Heat the oil mixture to around 50oC. While your oil is heating dissolve 190 of sodium hydroxide in water to make a saturated solution (exact amount will change depending on which oil you use). Make sure to keep the container you are mixing you lye in in an ice bath to prevent it from boiling.
Once your oil mixture reaches temperature mix in the sodium hydroxide solution and mix strongly for 20-30 minutes until the mixture becomes the texture of mashed potatoes.
Let sit overnight
prepare in a large pot a sodium chloride solution that is below saturation. Bring this solution to a boil and then once it is boiling add the solid soap mixture from the day before.
Let the soap sit in the water for 10-15 minutes to fully dissolve and then slowly reduce heat below a boil. Parts of the soap should float to the top as curdles, remove these chunks.
- In the beaker continue to boil off the remainder of the water present.
To clean the solution, dissolve in methanol and filter off the salt, then boil off the methanol.
Products
The soap curds that you removed are soap with glycerine removed, these can be heated and put into molds for the production of bars of soap but they will be very harsh on your skin so I wouldn't recommend using them, at least, not without using a moisturizing cream in conjunction. Mind you it may not be too bad as most commercial soaps have the glycerine removed so that they can sell you moisturizing cream as well. This being said, they have the extraction process honed in and slightly more efficient.
The other product will be a relatively small amount of glycerine.
Discussion
This is really a short post just to get this out there. Eventually I want to build up a library for how to produce most chemicals in such a way where anyone can have access to said chemicals. This is kind of inspired by NurdRage's project for making pyrimethamine from easily accessible chemicals and complete synthesis. The other reason I am doing this is because my cannabis essay from my first post is simply too long to post so I am building up my HP reserves and I am editing it to break it into multiple posts that I can just post one after the other. It is finished just being refined. The other thing I plan on doing is going into more depth of why a reaction is occurring the way it is but I am not a chemist by education so I have been wary of trying to explain the chemistry because I don't want to spread misinformation but I have a friend who is a chem major that I have told this about and he said he will double check my explanations. Ultimately I want to make chemistry even more accessible to the general populous without the default response to people wanting to learn chemistry be "take a university class". Yes I understand that lab procedures and practices are difficult to learn from reading but you don't need to go broke trying to do some fun chemistry, I mean glassware is expensive but that isn't the end of the world.