| dc.description.abstract | Mukwano Industries Uganda limited is a manufacturing company/ industry that produce various products which include plastics, water, laundry bar soap, refined oil, cooking oil, among others that are useful in the day-to-day life human activities and consumption. In this specific research, I concentrated on laundry bar soap and it is what I am going to discuss about with the numerous research done about it. Soap is water soluble sodium or potassium salt of fatty acids, soap is made from fats and oils or their fatty acids by treating them chemically with a strong alkali, a process known as saponification. Soap can also be defined as a compound of long chain of potassium and sodium salts of fatty acids. When soap is mixed with water, one end of the soap structure (hydrophobic end) interacts with water while the hydrophilic end interacts with the stain thus this describes the action of soap (quora.com). Soap is used in a variety of cleaning and lubricating purposes. For domestic use, soap acts as a surfactant for washing, bathing and other forms of housekeeping while for industrial use, soap is used as a thickener, components of some lubricants and precursors to catalysts nevertheless soap has various uses and purposes.In the manufacture of soap at Mukwano Industries Uganda Limited, a variety of raw materials are used to make soap and they are categorized into primary and secondary. The primary raw materials include oil, caustic soda and sodium silicate which is prepared accordingly before used to make soap, secondary raw materials include color, perfume, salt (sodium chloride), water, sodium carbonate and bleachers where different measurements of each are added to the neat soap from the continuous stirred reactors.
This research is going to focus on the variations in concentration of sodium silicate solution hence sodium silicate is commonly used as a binder and filler by soap manufacturing companies to increase their profitability and minimize costs of production of soap. Sodium silicate is any of various water-soluble substances obtained in the form of crystals, glasses, powders or aqueous solutions usually by melting silica with a sodium compound for instance sodium carbonate or sodium hydroxide (merriam-webster.com). The quality of soap is greatly affected by the concentration of sodium silicate solution by analyzing the following parameters; total fatty matter (TFM), alcohol insolubles and moisture content. High silicate concentration will increase the alcohol insolubles and soap bulkiness but lower the total fatty matter and moisture content which gives rise to high quality soap and increases profits generated by the company. Low silicate concentration will increase total fatty matter and moisture content but decrease the alcohol insolubles and soap bulkiness giving rise to low quality soap and lowering the profitability of the company. | en_US |
