cnidocyte
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Surfactants in products
In many hardware store products when I look at the ingredients I'll often notice "Non ionic surfactants < 5%" and stuff like that. Are these
impurities of significant concern to the home chemist who is using the product for the properties of its main constituent chemical? For example a
brick cleaning product I found stated that it contained HCl and less than 5% non ionic surfactants. No mention of what these surfactants are and I
couldn't find an MSDS for the product online.
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Synthettek
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You could always distill the product in question to obtain the exact ingredient you are trying to isolate.
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cnidocyte
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Don't have a distillation kit yet unfortunately. Right now I've to make do with a few flasks and beakers.
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peach
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If it's not written on the pack, I'll give the container and shake and take the lid off. Foam = back on the shelf.
It's going to be far too much hassle trying to use something like that for experimental work. I doubt it'd even work for HCl generation without
foaming it's way of the flask. Which makes me wonder if it'd work in a distillation as well. You're effectively boiling soap solution. That doesn't
work too well when I'm trying to clean the charred, burnt on remains of a drunken cooking adventure off the bottom of a pan with boiling soap.
There is a method of making pure, concentrated hydrochloric acid at home with products that come off the shelf and don't have surfactants in them
(because they'd ruin the way the product functioned). However, you'd need gas handling gear to produce usable quantities without loosing most of it
and it taking forever, or gassing yourself in the process. Which is kind of a step beyond distillation gear.
Unfortunately, it's often quite tricky to remove the surfactants, emulsifiers and so on from things like this, and the chemicals have a powerful
effect on surface properties. If you imagine using it to acidify in a separation, that's going to play hell with phase boundaries and emulsions.
[Edited on 12-8-2010 by peach]
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