5th Annual WSU Celebration of Research and Creative Scholarship
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Poster #68 - The Determination of Alcohol Content in Vanilla Extract Jixiao Li Faculty Co-author: Dr. Jeanne Franz Determining the ethanol content in vanilla extract is an important way to examine the product’s quality. This proposed research is based on the official method of Association of Analytical Communities (AOAC), aiming to quantitative analyzes the alcohol content in vanilla extract. It is designed for the Analysis Department of Watkins Inc. Considering the official AOAC method lacks details and the instrumentations of our and Watkins’s laboratory, some parts of procedure need to be optimized. The vanilla extract is a complex with many different contents, and some of the part, like water and glucose, cannot be inject into the GC directly because it degrades the instrument’s performance. Therefore, an efficient way to separate the alcohol from sample is required. Researchers from NASA used the castor oil to extract ethanol. The gravimetric method with castor oil yielded an average ethanol content of 35.6±0.63%, GC analysis yielded 37.2±1.78%. These valued are close to the manufacturer’s data which is 35% (determined by distillation method). However, castor oil is also a complex and the average boiling point (313˚C) is close to the upper operating limit of the GC-FID. For this reason, we decided to use a pure solvent. According to the polarity of ethanol (relatively low) and water (relatively high), we are considering use of toluene or hexane for extraction. Theoretically, toluene and n-hexane are water insoluble, but they are good solvents extraction of ethanol. Currently work is ongoing. |
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