Is there a chemical way to force oil and water to mix?
OK, I apologize for the excessive snarkiness here in GQ.
I have relocated the snarkiness to the Pit.
Use phase transfer agents. Common soap or perhaps not so common quaternary ammonium salts will work.
Little known fact not on Google:
Thin Lizzy is an anagram for Jinx. :smack:
-
-
- Yes, but what you use depends on what kinda oil you are dealing with–there’s multitudes of different kinds. The formula for Coca-Cola noted in the Big Secrets books by William Poundstone says that the well-known drink contains alcohol–because some of the flavorings are natural oils that will not mix with water. So they add a bit of alcohol to get them to mix and stay mixed. The end dilution ends up being far less than 1% alcohol.
~
- Yes, but what you use depends on what kinda oil you are dealing with–there’s multitudes of different kinds. The formula for Coca-Cola noted in the Big Secrets books by William Poundstone says that the well-known drink contains alcohol–because some of the flavorings are natural oils that will not mix with water. So they add a bit of alcohol to get them to mix and stay mixed. The end dilution ends up being far less than 1% alcohol.
-
Aren’t some oils water-soluble?
Seems I read somewhere that lanolin is the only naturally-occurring oil that’s water-soluble…
I am not sure what you mean by chemical means - any detergent or saop will emulsify the oils into water. It is possible to chemically modify oils to make them water soluble but then they wouldn’t really be oils
nit pick warning
I think you mean surfactants. Phase transfer agents such as quat salts are designed to take inorganic things into organic solvents, not the other way round
I remember being told in elementary school that one of the benefits of doing experiments in orbit in the shuttle is that, due to the greatly reduced gravity, you can make solutions that you can’t make on Earth. One example given was mixing oil and water. I can’t think of any reason why low gravity would make oil and water mix, but I’m not a chemist. So, what’s the straight dope?
On earth, the density difference between oil (d=~0.8) and water (d=1.0) causes oil to rise to the top of a mixture. In low gravity there is no top, so the density difference won’t drive a separation. Hydrophicity and surface tension will still promote separation of a space-emulsion, but those forces are weaker than buoyancy.
I thought that, by definition, oils weren’t water soluble?
Modern machine tools typically use a mixture of water soluable oil and water as coolant. Prior to mixing, it is about the consistancy of 90W gear oil. Mixed, the emulsion is milk-like in appearance and viscosity.
Interestingly, “normal” oil won’t mix with the emulsion, it floats on top.
The definition of ‘oil’ is pretty flexible, like the definition of ‘vegetable.’
Limonene has gotten to be a popular water soluble, yet oily substance over the past decade. Do modern machine shops smell of orange peels?
By “mix”, we might not mean an emulsion, right? I mean, emulsions aren’t mixed on the scale of the compounds in them, they’re just finely divided droplets of the things that aren’t mixed.
First, you can mix oil and water very perfectly if you do it in the gas or supercritical phases.
Second, you can mix them very perfectly if you accept having a big ratio between their concentrations. You can get a few ppm of most oils dissolved into water, or vice versa. It’s just mixes like 50:50 or 1:10 or 10:1 that don’t work as liquids.