macbluff619
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Ascorbic Acid Extraction from 1000mg Vitamin C Pills
I've been lurking around the site for awhile but this is my first post. Somehow I ended up on the following thread:
http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=3871
I thought, extract ascorbic acid? what a waste of time. Then I was dissolving nearly a full bottle of 1000mg Vitamin C in hot water. They dissolved
really fast and the cellulose in the pills made it really hard to filter. It took hours. I placed a small sample on a glass plate/hot plate. I burnt
the edges but the sticky film in the middle survived and has a few crystal-spots forming. It decomposes at 190C. This would take days to evaporate at
130-150, and then, wont some decompose even at that temp? I think I just wasted a whole bottle of vitamin C. Maybe I can drink it if I filter it
better.
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hissingnoise
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Why not just buy the acid and save yourself hassle?
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macbluff619
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That would make too much sense, I guess. You're right, it was stupid. Now I have about a liter of ascorbic acid solution. I did find this interesting
study
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf960079k.
Maybe I don't have to drink it after all! Problem is, I don't have a pH 2 buffer.
Do you have any idea why one can make a buffer with potassium chloride and HCl but not with sodium chloride and HCl? That doesn't make sense to me. Or
any ideas how I can make a pH 2 buffer from something in the kitchen?
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macbluff619
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So I went ahead and evaporated some over steam. It didn't burn so I'm left with a crude yellow salt that tastes like...well, like vitamin C. Not very
ground-breaking, I know. It is slightly soluble in absolute alcohol (1g/50mL) so I put about 5 g in 100mL of hot moonshine (~90%), filtered out more
gunk, and recrystallized. Now I have a slightly cleaner light-yellow salt.
Now maybe I can find something useful to do.
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Hexavalent
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This is very irresponsible; you should never consume anything made, processed or handled in the lab. You never know what kind of contamination could
be present on your glassware and equipment, it's just not worth the risk.
I attest to hissingnoise, it is much simpler and easier (and probably eventually cheaper) just to buy the stuff, e.g. on eBay. That's what I did when
I used vitamin C for my urine analysis, written up in Prepubs, having tried extractions fruitlessley via several methods numerous times.
"Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." Winston Churchill
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