Soap candle. Fun chemistry experience at home

ENTERTAINING EXPERIENCES AT HOME
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Soap candle. Chemical experiments

Entertaining experiments in chemistry

Entertaining experiences at home / Chemistry experiments for children

When we were talking about why does soap wash, then they mentioned the special structure of its molecule: a “head” and a long “tail”, moreover, the “head” tends to water, and the “tail”, on the contrary, is repelled from water ...

Let's take a closer look at the hydrophobic "tail" - a long hydrocarbon chain. Such compounds are very common and extremely important for industry. They are an indispensable component of many fats, oils, lubricants and other useful substances. One of them - the so-called stearin - we will now get, taking laundry soap as a basis.

With a knife, cut from half a piece of laundry soap and put in a clean tin can (or in your used saucepan). Pour in enough water to cover the soap chips, and place the mixture in a water bath. Stir the contents of the saucepan with a wooden stick from time to time so that the soap quickly dissolves in the water. When this finally happens, remove the vessel from the fire (of course, not with your bare hand) and pour vinegar into it. Under the action of acid, a thick white mass will stand out from the solution and float to the surface. This is stearin - a translucent mixture of several substances, mainly stearic C₁₇H₃₅COOH and palmitic C₁₅H₃₁COOH acids. It is impossible to say the exact composition, it depends on the substances that went into the preparation of soap.

From stearin, as is known from fiction, candles are made. Or rather, they did it before, because now candles are mostly not stearin, but paraffin - paraffin obtained from oil is cheaper and more accessible. But, as soon as we have stearin at our disposal, we will prepare a candle from it. That, by the way, is a fun activity in itself!

When the jar is completely cool, scoop the stearin off the surface with a spoon and transfer it to a clean bowl. Rinse the stearin two or three times with water and wrap in a clean white cloth or filter paper to absorb excess moisture. When the stearin is completely dry, let's start with a candle.

Here is perhaps the simplest trick: dip a thick twisted thread, for example, from a kerosene wick, repeatedly into slightly heated melted stearin, each time allowing the stearin to harden on the wick. Proceed in this way until a candle of sufficient thickness grows on the wick. This is a good way, although somewhat tedious; in any case, in ancient times, candles were often prepared in this way.

There is a simpler way: immediately coat the wick with stearin heated to soften (it can even be freshly cooked, not yet cooled down). But in this case, the wick will be worse saturated with fusible mass and the candle will turn out not very good, although it will burn.

For beautiful, figured candles, manufacturing methods are not easy. And first of all, you need to make a form - wooden, plaster, metal. In this case, too, it is desirable to impregnate the wick first with one or two layers of stearin; then it is fixed in the form so that it passes exactly in the middle. It is desirable that the wick be slightly taut. And after that, hot stearin is poured into the mold.

By the way, in this way you can make candles from paraffin, i.e., in fact, from purchased candles, by melting them and giving them the shape you like. However, we warn you - you will have to tinker ...

Having received a candle from soap, we will carry out the experiment in the opposite direction: we will prepare soap from a candle. Only not from paraffin, soap cannot be made from it at all, because paraffin molecules do not have "heads". But if you are sure that the candle is stearic, then you can safely prepare laundry soap from it. Natural beeswax is also suitable.

Heat a few fragments of a stearin candle in a water bath, hot enough, but not brought to a boil. When the stearin is completely melted, add a concentrated solution of washing (soda ash) to it. The resulting white viscous mass is soap. Hold it for a few more minutes in a water bath, and then, putting on a mitten or wrapping your hand in a towel so as not to burn yourself, pour the still hot mass into any form - at least into a matchbox. When the soap has hardened, take it out of the box.

To make sure that this is soap and that it washes will not be difficult. Just please don't use it to wash your hands, because we don't know how pure the ingredients in the candle were.

Author: Olgin O.M.

We recommend interesting experiments in physics:

▪ Brake in the egg

▪ Chess and inertia

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We recommend interesting experiments in chemistry:

▪ Almonds - bitter and sweet

▪ Soap from a stearin candle

▪ shaking ink

See other articles Section Entertaining experiences at home.

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