Re: Tissue

On Mon, 23 Oct 2000, Witho Worms en Jorien van Santen wrote:

> Thanks Wayde for your help. About the alcohol in my tissue. I thought
> that I had read a recommendation to use alcohol to lower the surface
> tension and get rid of bubbles. Vaughn's remark about spraying with
> alcohol had the same purpose.

I don't use alcohol in my tissue, but some people do.

In the recent discussion about minimizing bubbles, the use of alcohol was
indeed mentioned, both as an additive during the tissue formulation and
as a spray after pouring the tissue. I speculated that this probably
would work by lowering the surface tension of the sol causing the bubbles
to burst.

> I think there was a distinction made
> between denaturated and ethyl alcohol. The last one should be better
> than the first.

Ethyl alcohol is the alcohol you drink in beer, wine, etc., and most
governments tax alcoholic beverages at a fairly high rate. Since ethyl
alcohol is useful commercially as a solvent etc., this causes a bit of a
problem. Industry wants to be able to use ethyl alcohol for various
purposes without having to pay the high beverage taxes for obtaining it.
The "solution" to this dilemma is to denature the ethyl alcohol by adding
a poison. The idea is to make it unfit for human consumption while not
appreciably affecting the desired chemical properties. Denatured alcohol
is usually ethyl alcohol to which an amount of methyl alcohol has
been added. (The extra twist here is that the denaturing agent has to be
something relatively difficult to remove from the solution.)

I'd be pretty surprised if someone thinks that pure ethyl alcohol would
work better for bursting bubbles than denatured alcohol since they are
very close to the same thing.

- Wayde
  (wallen@lug.boulder.co.us)
Received on Mon Oct 23 15:22:53 2000