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Moises Chame

How do you dissolve oleic acid in water?

Andrew Lygra  Follow

I’ll answer this with two questions.

  1. How much oleic acid? If you are thinking of a lot of oleic acid, say, a 50% solution, then success is unlikely. Something on the order of 1% might be achievable.
  2. How hot is your water? I don’t know numbers, but I have read online that oleic acid will dissolve in water given sufficient temperature (and pressure) extremes. Hot water always dissolves more of most things that an equal amount of cold water can.

If you will allow a bit of chemical wiggle room, oleic acid can be dissolved in a water solution as [Na]+ [Oleate]-

Oleic acid with its proton missing might be close enough to what you want. Dissolve your oleic acid in a water solution of enough NaOH to take all the protons you need to get the fatty acid to “disappear”. Use a slight excess of moles of NaOH compared to the number of moles of oleic acid you are adding.

Thanks for Listening.

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Ben Boyarko  Follow

Oleic Acid is soluble in alcohol “ethanol” (>25 mg/ml), ether, acetone, chloroform, DMF (100 mg/ml), DMSO (100 mg/ml, but is practically insoluble in H2O because, the polar end of the oleic acid molecule is attracted to polar water molecules. the nonpolar end of the oleic acid molecule is hydrophobic. as a result, when a drop of an oleic acid solution is placed on the surface of water, the oleic acid molecules form a thin layer as alcohol evaporates..

Oleic acid is obtained by hydrolysis of olive oil.

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