PREPARATION OF LOCAL SOAP WITH WOODASH DERIVED FROM THE CALYX AND THE COROLLA OF PALM FLOWER (EJEASIS GUINEENSIS)

CHAPTER   ONE

INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND

Soap is the earliest detergent know to man and apparently was first made by the Romans from animal fats and oil and wood ash which is an alkali that contains potassium carbonate, sodium, potassium hydroxide called potash leached from the wood ash (Robert, 1994).  It is also an unsaturated ester since an ester can be split into an alcohol and a carboxylic acid by hydrolysis.  Meaning that it does not contain all the solutes that can be dissolve at a particular temperature (KirtOthmer, 1994).  Also soap is a metallic salt of a fatty acid because if a metallic base is used in the hydrolysis instead of water, the metallic salt of the carboxylic acid is obtained, not the acid because carboxylic acid are weak acid which dissociates only slightly in solution

(Hou, 1992).

1.2     Soap can be defined as the sodium or potassium salt of fatty acids, made by heating fats and oil with caustic soda or caustic potash respectively (Cook 1990).

Most soap was manufactured by an alkaline hydrolysis reaction called the Saponification, which is the reaction of fats and oil with alkali.