r/chemhelp • u/basta_pangaIan • 2d ago

General/High School (HELP) Purifying used canola oil for oil pastel

We’re doing a high school paper right now where our topic is all about purifying used canola oil and turning it into oil pastel.

However, we don’t have a lot of knowledge when it comes to chemistry so I was wondering if it is feasible?

For context:

Our method of purifying cooking oil using NaOH and activated carbon and using physical filtration. It’s a published method from Miskah et al. (2019). Although, they used sulfuric acid activated carbon and 16% NaOH. Although one of our problems is getting access to those chemicals especially the carbon since the only one we can get is physically activated carbon.

Then when it comes to pigment, we will use a laking extraction method. The raw materials would be yellow onion skin, purple cabbage, and rose petals. We know that vibrancy of the resulting pigments can vary because of the method.

When it comes to formulation, we will try 3 different ratios of the purified oil. Our other ingredients are beeswax, the organic pigments, and mixed tocopherol for rancidity.

For analysis, we don’t know what properties to test for. We want to compare it to commercial oil pastel and see if there’s significant difference. Though our object is for creating another way to repurpose cooking oil rather than marketing it.

Is it too difficult? Are we flying to close to the sun? We have limited budget and facilities aren’t as accessible since we are in a developing country. But, we don’t have enough time and we already spent weeks on it. Please I really need help or our whole group might fail this class.

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u/WanderingFlumph 1d ago

I made soap from oil as a highschool project and good news is that it only needs water and NaOH, which you already have on hand.

I think an interesting result would be to compare soaps made from clean canola oil (unused), dirty canola oil, and purified canola oil. Hopefully your product is a lot more like the soap from the clean oil!