Titration Calculations & Making Biodiesel

"GRAYDON BLAIR: My name is Graydon Blair from Utah Biodiesel Supply and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to tell you how to do a titration in a little bit deeper form. First of all, I have an unknown amount of acid in waste vegetable oil that I've gone on out and I've collected to make biodiesel. I want to know how much lye I need to add to it. So, here's how we do it. We take our oil and we're going to mix together something called a 0.1% solution in water of--I'm going to use potassium hydroxide but I'm going to call it a base. Okay. So, I've got an acid here. Don't know how much it is but I know how much I have in my base. I've got a 0.1 solution. Okay. So, this is known. And what I'm going to do is put some of this in an alcohol solution. Alcohol because it has no pH. pH kinda measures acid and base. And then I'm going to slowly add some of this stuff to it until I see the pH of this stuff jump toward the acid side or the base side. I use an indicator called phenolphthalein to do that. It's just a pH indicator. So, that's how we do the basic math to make a titration."