Predicament: Precipitating and removing sodium from solution

[TriputoryHeadicine]

G'morning ADD!

I have a predicament: I Need to drink a solution that has, among other things (APAP, codeine) a total of
4,800 mg's of sodium...

I wouldn't be putting that amount of Na into my body if it wasn't necessary, so I ask of you, ADD:

Can I remove the sodium from the solution: without using HCL or any other chemicals that require goggles, gloves or a mask? I'm aiming towards drinking it, and taking a healthy amount of potassium to balance
my salts, but I'd love to remove it entirely.

Thanks for your time,

T

 

[Torabora]

removing dissolved natrium is hard to do guess you have to take it ^^

 

[sekio]

There's no easy way to precipitate sodium out of solution unless you have a set of reagents, and thoswe will probably react with other compounds in your brew.

5 grams of sodium is not something I'd want to be eating regularly, but if this is a one-off thing you shouldn't worry - your kidneys/digestive tract should handle it OK.

For comparison, we are talking about ingesting rougfhly a tablespoon of salt. It'd be nasty tasting but it won't harm you.

 

[Epsilon Alpha]

Thats only equivalent to 4 KFC double downs or 3 triple baconators, I think I could eat that and survive. Just be sure to stay hydrated and keep your potassium up.
Only other thing you could really do is dry your solution out and hopefully do a organic extraction, but I gather you just crushed up a bunch of T3's or the like and want to get it done quickly.

Not really ADD, so moving to other drugs.

 

[TriputoryHeadicine]

Thanks for the replies- and putting things in perspective w/ that KFC meal ^_^

It is EXTREMELY hard to get down...But as it is a one-off... Down it goes!

(followed by Mucho potassium)

 

[sekio]

As long as you get the balance of sodium/potassium/water within reasonable levels (I.e. you're not dehydrated and eating a pound of rock salt) you shouldn't even ahve to worry about postassium supplementation - your body's homeostatsis will deal with that.

 

[The.Ghost]

I'm not aware of any sodium salts that are insoluble in water. One potassium salt comes to mind, but it's a very obscure one.

The only way I can see to get something like sodium out of an aqueous solution is with a (cation) ion exchange resin. Put the solution through a column of resin charged with, say, potassium ions, and the sodium ions will be exchanged 1:1 with potassium ions, giving you a potassium solution. Good resins are hard to get, though, so I'm just throwing this out there as one potential idea.

 

[TriputoryHeadicine]

I'm not aware of any sodium salts that are insoluble in water. One potassium salt comes to mind, but it's a very obscure one.

The only way I can see to get something like sodium out of an aqueous solution is with a (cation) ion exchange resin. Put the solution through a column of resin charged with, say, potassium ions, and the sodium ions will be exchanged 1:1 with potassium ions, giving you a potassium solution. Good resins are hard to get, though, so I'm just throwing this out there as one potential idea.

Thanks for that. I came across that idea on another project (would it be viable to bring melted plastic out of solution?) and would love to get one (when I'm rich) to lay around with).

 

[The.Ghost]

Here's my method for getting usable resin from common items. It will take several hours of tedious work, though.

1. Get a cation ion-exchange resin water softener cartridge. Open it up and pour out some beads.
2. Throw the beads into a blender.
3. Add plenty of water and blend for ~3 minutes.
4. Pour out the milky resin / water supernatant into a container, leaving the coarse stuff in the blender.
5. Stir the supernatant up and pour it into another container after the coarse particles have settled. You want the particles that fall at ~0.2 - 1 mm / second, so ~30 seconds for a 3 cm deep layer. Then add more water to the stuff that settled.
6. Repeat the previous step several times to get as much fine matter as possible. Then return the stuff that settled to the blender.
7. Take the combined supernatant solutions and remove the coarse particles that got through as in step 5, using 3 washes.
8. Stir up what you have left and let it sit until the fine particles have settled. For a 3 cm thick layer, that would be ~150 seconds (30mm / (.2 mm / sec)). Pour off the supernatant.
9. Repeat the previous step 3 times on the supernatant to get all of the suitably-sized particles out.
10. Discard the supernatant. At this point, it will mostly be super-fine particles that will never settle out / clog a column.
11. Repeat steps 3-9 many times until you have collected enough resin. Add more fresh beads as needed.
12. (Optional but recommended) Put the resin you have collected into a column, then flush it with a solution of copper sulfate (go to a hardware store and find the root killer). Flush with distilled water, then a solution of any colorless salt. This will flush the bluish copper ions out. If any blue color remains, you have resin particles that are too large to react all the way through and must be removed. If it's too hard to get liquids through the column, you have some particles that are too small. Re-sediment as above to fix either problem, although you may want to change the settling rates.

Well, I hope that made sense.

TL;DR: Grind water softener beads in a blender, use a sedimentation technique to get the right sized particles.