Further uses of bases

 Hello! Welcome to today’s lesson. It’s indeed very awesome that we have made this much progress learning together as an online community. We look forward to doing greater things together.


As we explained yesterday, today we would look at more uses of bases and you would certainly find this very interesting. Yesterday, we saw the important role that bases play in the body when the acidity in the stomach goes above the normal level.


It would interest you to know that in petroleum refining, an important step is to wash the raw crude with strong acids such as oleum. This serves the purpose of removing impurities in the crude. If we charge this highly acidified crude into the refining tower, the acid in the crude could corrode the metal used to make the tower and badly damage it. Hence an equally strong base such as NaOH is used to wash the crude oil so that the acid is neutralized before charging the crude oil into the refining tower.


All of you use soap right? Let me tell you how soap is made. Soap is made by reaction of a fat or oil and a caustic base such as sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide. We would obtain a trisodium or tripotassium salt of the particular fat or oil used as the desired product and glycerol as a byproduct. This desired product is what you commonly call soap. You would see the reaction of saponification(soap making) involving a triglyceride (fat or oil) and caustic sodium hydroxide (commonly called caustic soda) in the image attached.


 The chlor-alkali industry is the segment of the chemical industry that is concerned with the production of chlorine and caustic soda as heavy chemicals(heavy chemicals means chemicals that are in high demand due to vast applications of it). Millions of tons of caustic soda are produced each year for use in the saponification processes. The global caustic soda market size was USD 44,959.2 million in 2019 and is projected to reach USD 55,557.7 million by 2027.


Agriculture is not left out in the global usage of bases. Often, farmers have to battle with soil that has become more acidic due to leaching or acid rain. Leaching is the washing down of useful cations in the soil to layers that are much below the surface leaving only hydrogen ions on the soil surface of soil thereby making the soil acidic. When this occurs, it is common for farmers to apply lime compounds such as CaCO3, CaO or Ca(OH)2 to the soil to react with the hydrogen ions and remove them from top soil.


Now off to cosmetics! A common base that is used in the in the cosmetics industry is sodium bicarbonate. It is used to keep skin care products not too acid and not too basic either. More recently, there has been a lot of talk about alkaline cosmetics because it is believed that an alkaline cosmetic can tighten the skin tissue and help the skin to eliminate contaminants and acids via sweat and sebaceous glands.


Soda and lime are often added to glass during the process of making glass. This is because, the soda serves to lower the temperature at which the silica (main ingredient in glass manufacture) melts, and the lime acts as a stabilizer for the silica. Soda-lime glass is inexpensive, chemically stable, reasonably hard, and extremely workable, because it is capable of being resoftened a number of times if necessary to finish a production process.


Lastly, lets see how useful bases can be in the manufacture of paper. In the paper industry, sodium hydroxide is used to decompose fibers. The first role of sodium hydroxide in the paper industry is to separate lignin from cellulose. Secondly, sodium hydroxide can also play a role in bleaching the pulp in the paper industry.


Assignment; Research about the bleaching powder and explain the role of a named base in the production of bleaching powder. Type your response in the comments section below this post.


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