Sodium stearate is a substance more commonly known as standard soap. It has a hydrophobic tail with a hydrophilic head causing it to bound oils and water into a single, unbreakable emulsion.

This is a huge problem in chemistry if its present with oils you wish to recover.

I would like to hear some suggestions as to various workups to separate an alkaloid based oil from a Sodium stearate containing solution.

I have considered possibly, acidification then further addition of Calcium ions in order to precipitate the Stearic acid as Calcium stearate which due to its insolubility in water is unable to act as a soap. Addition of NaOH should allow the alkaloid to be free from solution without the actions of the steric acid.

Any suggestions on a workup would be a huge help. Would steam distillation be effective at breaking this bond?

A few test last night may have showed me what needs to be done. Stearic acids solubility according to its MSDS(*attached)is much different then its behavior when as the Alkali salt. Its completely insoluble in cold water and I believe that upon acidification with 34% HCl I seen a white precipitate form that was the Stearic acid. This could be filtered out under cold conditions and then basification with 5% NaOH should precipitate the amine from solution allowing recovery thru traditional means of typical acid/base extraction.

I also appeared to have some success of precipitating Magnesium stearate by acidification of the Sodium stearate and adding Magnesium Carbonate but due to a lack of Magnesium Hydroxide this produced heavy foam that takes hours to fully settle and further addition of more water to wash it all down.

As it stands a cold filter of acidified solution seems like the best mode of action at the moment.

This could mean that the composition of some phamacuticals designed to inhibit the extraction of the active amines could have the inverse effect of allowing simpler isolation of the amine by trapping the amine in an emulsion that could be seperated out then released from the Surfactant thru methods described herein.

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More suggestions are welcome.