Preliminary Studies of the Evaluation of Detergent Efficiencies of Soaps from Kinetic Data

Abstract

Detergent efficiencies for soaps prepared from combinations of oils and aqueous ash extracts from various Ghanaian agricultural wastes were evaluated by means of two criteria: rates of desorption of artificial soil from mutton cloth samples by 5% solutions of the soaps and turnover numbers obtained from the determination of rates of desorption at various soap concentrations. The results correlate well with the total fatty acid contents of the soaps, but the proposed criteria should be better indicators of detergency than fatty acid content in certain cases.