NaCl extraction

[Shiver]

Hi,

 

First post, hello all! I have a question I'm struggling to find an answer to. I'd like to take Sea Salt and remove the Sodium Chloride, leaving behind pretty much the remaining mineral profile of sea water (the NaCl can be sacrificial as I have no interest in that). Is there a fairly safe (procedurally) way to do that with chemicals? I was told that a Downs cell would do it, so went to read up on that, which all looked great until I saw that it uses 30,000 Amps! (no thanks). I tried mixing it with a silver solution which made what looked like a white emulsion, and when it settled there was matter in the bottom of the test tube but I don't know what I'm staring at. Actually I had 2 tubes, one was HCL and one was water, and the matter in the bottom of the tube is off white in one and almost black in the other, but this stuff had been sitting around for about a year and I don't remember which was which (not very scientific of me I know - I'd done that for completely different reasons than this current endeavour).

 

Any clues would be very much appreciated.

 

Regards

Paul

[John Cuthber]

Most people want to get pure salt from sea salt, you want the other way round, but the process is the same (you just throw away a different part).

 

There are a couple of ways of purifying things like this. For most solid materials you can recrystallise the stuff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recrystallization_(chemistry)

 

In that process they are trying to collect the pure solid that forms; in your case, you throw that away and dry down the other stuff.

That will work for salt, but badly.

The process relies on the material being more soluble in hot water than cold; that's barely true for salt. Salt is only slightly more soluble in boiling water than in cold water.

 

The other process might not appeal to you because it needs concentrated acid.

If you dissolve the sea salt in water and then treat it with concentrated hydrochloric acid some of the salt will crystallise out. Most of the other materials will stay in solution and you can pour that off. You can then distil off the acid (carefully) and recover a mixture with less salt, and more of the other things.

If you repeat that you will remove a lot of the salt.

Neither of these will remove all the salt.

Having said all that, once you remove the salt and water there's not really much left. Why do you want to do this?

[Shiver]

Thanks for the response. To answer your question, it's not critical to remove all the salt, but a good amount of it would be the aim. The reason is because nearby there's a salt source that would at one time have been a sea bed, and with the way it makes me feel when eating it, I have a suspicion it has a great mineral profile. Popular belief is that salt is bad for you, and it is my contention that it's an imbalance of minerals that is bad for you, and that the 'mono salt' you get in the shops is what they're really referring to (since it would create an potassium/sodium inbalance). Anyhow, rather than try to change anyones thinking on that, I just thought if we could remove the sodium it would be much more widely accepted as a health mineral supplement. If I can remove the NaCl then I'd send it to a lab for assay to see if it has an appropriate profile (the sea and the blood minerals having a fair degree of correlation). The lab isn't cheap (USD equivalent of around $30 per mineral test, so testing for the vast majority, as well as any farming chemicals that could potentially leech through from the surface, I want to give them a decent sized sample of what would be the finished product (even if this batch was done kitchen sink style). If I can define a process for the product then we can have a GMP manufacturer produce it for us according to that process.

[John Cuthber]

It would be much easier to measure the minerals present and make up a mixture from those components to mimic the stuff (without the salt).

Incidentally, nobody is going to invest money on a scheme founded on "with the way it makes me feel when eating it, I have a suspicion it has a great mineral profile."

[Shiver]

That's okay, since it would be me doing the investing and doesn't need anyone elses confidence. I have good rapport with our customers and their needs, and there's something in this stuff. I trust my body and what it says when the logic and facts are missing or in conflict. The assay would be a formality and legality that just needs to be done, but I already know it works. You can feel it in minutes.

 

Incidentally, nobody is going to invest money on a scheme founded on "with the way it makes me feel when eating it, I have a suspicion it has a great mineral profile."

[John Cuthber]

"If I can define a process for the product then we can have a GMP manufacturer produce it for us according to that process."

You can personally afford to underwrite a factory that runs to GMP?

 

Anyway, if you plan to sell it as some sort of health tonic the local legal authorities will require real evidence that it works and frankly, I think it is much more likely that you are experiencing the placebo effect than any real benefit.

 

Even a very simple double blind test with a few of your friends would help you a lot here.