Concentrated solutions of acetic acid are often sold in chemical supply and photography supply stores. However sometimes it can be rather expensive, hard to get, or in inconvenient quantities.  By far the most popular place to get acetic acid is from vinegar. Unfortunately it is only around 5% and has limited use. Vinegar however can be turned into glacial acetic acid with a little bit of work, and a few other readily available chemicals.
   First thing you will want to do is neutralize the vinegar with baking soda or some other base such as carbonate or a hydroxide. This will produce a sodium acetate. Boil the water away until the sodium acetate is dry. Careful not to forget about it because the sodium acetate will burn, or begin pop all over when it begins to dehydrate.
   Once you have dry sodium acetate you will want to react that with an acid. Generally acids stronger then acetic acid will work so this includes hydrochloric acid, phosphoric acid, sulfuric acid and sodium bisulfate. If you want a nearly pure and dry acetic acid you will have to start out with an acid that is also concentrated . I recommend using either sulfuric acid or sodium bisulfate. Sulfuric acid being the better of the two to use.
   Adding one mole of sodium acetate to one moles of sulfuric acid will yield and sodium bisulfate and acetic acid upon distillation. Adding two moles of  sodium acetate and one mole of sulfuric acid will yield sodium sulfate and acetic acid upon distillation. I have had the best yield of acetic acid using  the mole to mole reaction.

   Alternatively if you feel sulfuric acid has better uses, or if you don’t have any, you can mix dry sodium bisulfate and sodium acetate and heat it until acetic acid begins to come off. the vapors  are of course collected by distillation. This is a lower yielding reaction, and also the last half of the 2:1 reaction mentioned above.


If you do not need glacial acetic acid, you can mix hydrochloric acid or a solution of sodium bisulfate with sodium acetate and distill until dry. The concentration of the first acid will determine the concentration of the acetic acid distilled. Acetic acid produced from hydrochloric acid may contaminated with hydrochloric acid if you added an excess of hydrochloric acid. In order to prevent this contamination have a slight excess of sodium acetate when you begin to distill.

Sulfuric acid doesn't work for that, but I think another reaction happens. I know you can make acetic anhydride from a sulfur chloride and anhydrous sodium acetate or with bromine, sulfur and sodium acetate.

I don't know, you'd have to include the hazmat charges. Also how much money is spent in boiling away the water from the sodium acetate. You'd have to consider a lot of things to determine if it were cheaper. I guess if you only need a little bit this way is probably better, but if you often use decent quantities of it, you'd probably be better off with just buying it.

I've seen it for a lot cheaper then what you've posted - I think a gallon for 25-30 bucks. Not to sure how pure it is though, but they claim it is glacial acetic acid.

If two much bicarbonate is used to neutralize then it will foam up as it did to me last time spraying GAA and sulfuric acid in my face.

why were you adding bicarb to a mix of GAA and sulfuric acid?

H2SO4 burns are pretty intense. I had a brush with a squirt once and sprinted to the bathroom to wash it off with soap. I was fine since I had water and soap on it in less than 10 seconds but it was 97% con. and within 2 seconds after it hit me, I was already feeling the burn.

Not fun.

There is quite a few other ways to produce it which have been discussed over at SciMad pretty well. The use of a Ketan lamp to produce Acetic anhydride from acetone seems like a great way at first glance but then you have to face the fact that a whole lotta bad things could happen from making it that way. Besides the dangers associated with ketane you have to face the reality that the whole shit may just blow up in your face if your not mistaken.

Ill take a NaAcO accident over a keten one any day of the week.

I could post some of the suggestions that I have found over there if it is desired but mind you they are untested by me so I cant vouch for them personaly.

~Sedit

I've never heard about acetic acid being extracted with ethyl acetate, that is very interesting! I wonder how well it would work to extract it from the store vinegar? Have you ever done it? I bet temperature could play a big roll in the extraction.

Yeah, could be the sulfuric acid, or maybe carbonates in the mix. 

When doing something like this, you should also factor time spent into this reaction.  Figure your time is worth $25/hr.  Even if you steal your neighbors power (or use solar power), and all your reagents are free, you're still out of the ballpark as far as saving money.  If you're tight on cash, that's one thing, but there are much better things you could be doing with your time than trying to produce liters of an acid.  Just some food for thought.

if it has to do with concentration since this is the driest you've ever run it, you could just add a little bit of water and hope that helps. Then further purify later if all else fails.

Don't you have vinegar essence avaliable in grocery stores in US? Here we have it at considerable low cost, and high purity - a 70% solution, sold practically in any grocery