[tankman]

I have an inorganic crystalline compound.
A 15lb bag is added to a large tank of water and heated to be used as a degreaser.
I would prefer to store and to apply the product as a liquid concentrate instead.

Simple thinking says to add enough water to 15lbs of the powder until it is all dissolved at room temperature. Bottle the liquid and you are done.

Would there be a smarter way to do this even if it means reformulating the crystalline compound?

[Borek]

1. Are you sure it is stable once dissolved?

2. Nobody will tell you how to reformulate an unknown compound.

[tankman]

Let's make the assumption that there are no stability issues and that the formulation of the current compound is not unknown.

[Borek]

It doesn't make the problem solvable.

I have a number here, I know how to factor it, but I am wondering if it can be factored a different way. Can you suggest a different factoring? Oh, and no, I won't tell you what the number is.

[tankman]

Borek or anyone else who can respond to the OP.
I am not looking for a formulation I am simply asking a general question and looking for a rule of thumb answer.

Again, if a water soluble compound is currently being supplied to a customer as a solid and one would rather supply it as a liquid does one simply dissolve the original compound in as much water as necessary and then bottle it or is there another approach?

For arguments sake lets say the compound is sodium carbonate.

[discodermolide]

You would have to get the approval of the buyer.
In general it is easier to transport solids than liquids or solutions.
Also it depends upon the stability of the solution.
I would leave it as the solid.

[Borek]

Borek or anyone else who can respond to the OP.
I am not looking for a formulation I am simply asking a general question and looking for a rule of thumb answer.

You are asking question that is way too broad, so there is no applicable rule of thumb. Depending on details it may, or may not work.

[fledarmus]

The rule of thumb is that you make a lot of solutions and see which one is the easiest to handle and that the customer will pay for.

There are way too many variables in this problem to even attempt a solution without some details. Even the one hypothetical you gave shows enormous variability. Let's suppose you do use sodium carbonate - what temperatures will you expect the solution to be exposed to? Are you shipping any to Norway? Egypt? In sealed shipping containers exposed to sunlight? The solubility of sodium carbonate is 71 g/L at 0°C, over 450 g/L at 100°C, so unless you are using a large excess of water, you can expect precipitation from the solution at some point. Not to mention the exchange of carbon dioxide with the air, which will also change the concentration of carbonate in solution - carbonates are notoriously unstable in solution due to carbon dioxide transfer with the air. Then you have the shipping issues - will shipping the excess weight of water be worth the effort and expense, even though handling liquids is much faster? What about spill clean-ups? End-user handling? It's a lot easier to lift 15 pounds of sodium carbonate solid to throw into the tank than it is to lift the almost 100 liters of water it would take to dissolve it all at 0°C.

Formulations is a science all its own, and chemistry is only a small part of the solution. Even for an answer to just the chemistry part, knowing what chemicals you are handling and how they will be handled is critical to even begin looking for an answer.

[tankman]

Fledarmus,
Many thanks for your excellent reply.
You read and understood my OP and gave me the answer I was looking for.
The various factors you mentioned were in fact some of the factors I considered.
I did the math and came to similar results that you mentioned in your reply.

By the time you have finished dissolving 15lbs of compound in the right amount of water you would end up with a 10 gallon container of solution which makes no sense at all.

So it will remain as a solid.

The next challenge is going to be to see if we can find green raw materials to make up an equivalent compound with the same efficacy.