Titration Theory & Making Biodiesel

"GRAYDON BLAIR: My name is Graydon Blair from Utah Biodiesel Supply and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to teach you how to do a titration. It's really important to know what it is and how to do it. First of all, oil, as it degrades especially when you use waste vegetable oil, gets acidic in nature. In school, if any of you have ever made a volcano, you know that acids and bases cancel each other out. So, if I've got an acid, I can add a base to it and equals zero. Okay? I can cancel that out. And that's what we're going to do when we do a titration. We're going to take an unknown amount of acid in our waste vegetable oil and we're going to add to that acid some base to figure out how much acid is in our oil. Once we know that amount, that is going to tell us how much lye we're going to need when we make biodiesel. It's important to know how much you need because if you add too much, you're going to make a lot of soap. If you don't add enough, you're going to make--you're not really going to make biodiesel. It's going to be kinda gloppy, okay? So, we've got an acid in our oil. We've got a base in our lye. And the next step is we're going to show you how to measure that."