Basic Titration When 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 basic titration on your oil. We're going to first of all add 10 milliliters of isopropyl alcohol to a vessel and I've got this measured up to 10 right here. So, we got 10 milliliters of isopropyl alcohol. I'm going to put 1 milliliter of oil in here. I'm going to suck that up to my one mark and get my bubble out of there. So, I'm what? Sitting at 1--start to back up to 1 and mix that in there. We're going to mix that up really, really well. Then I'm going to put a couple drops of phenolphthalein in here, 1, 2, 3, 4. Okay, then I want to stir this up really, really well. So, I'm just going to swirl that around for a little bit. This is my unknown acid solution. I've got oil and I don't know what its acid content is. I'm now going to take and suck up some titration solution that I've made earlier. Now I'm just can start dropping some in, I want to measure where I'm at, so I'm sitting at 8 on this over here, I'll bring it over this way. I'm sitting at 8 and we're going to count how many drops it takes before this stuff turns purple. Okay, so I'm just going to start dropping some in. It went purple and then went back and our goal is to get to purple and to stay purple for 30 seconds. Okay, we're getting there, almost there, turn a little bit more purple. Okay, there's purple. And so, I'm going to count now, so 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 30 and we are still somewhat purple. Looks like we need just a little bit more in there to stay purple. Once you've gone to purple, you're then going to measure how much we used. So, we measure dhow many milliliters we used in here. We started at 8 and now we're sitting at 5. So 5, 6, 7, 8 so we used 3 milliliters of titration solution to turn this purple and keep it purple for 30 seconds. And that's how you do a titration. So, we had 3. We'll show you the next step to make biodiesel with."