Is liquid citric acid an acceptable Acid for A/B extraction? I have 400ml of Keurig Descaling Solution, which lists Citric Acid as the only ingredient.

I'm planning to do a Phalaris arundinacea extraction with the A/B method, using citric acid as the acidifying agent, and Calcium Hydroxide as the basifying agent. I only have xylene as a solvent right now but I would like to find something that doesn't smell so strongly. There isn't any reason why liquid citric acid is going to ruin an extraction right?

This and this should help.

But simply, if that's the only ingredient, then it should be sufficient.

One love

Clearly a minimum of one other ingredient, not mentioned, is water otherwise the citric acid would be in solid form. (At least this saves you the time you would have spent dissolving the citric acid.) It would be worth checking the concentration of citric acid in the solution - this information should be on the packaging - if only to have some grasp of its neutralisation equivalent.

Update, I found 2 Urnex PDFs that gave me more information, its strange that there wasn't more info on the actual bottle however.

The first document (2019) gave a concentration of 7-13% citric acid, and a PH of 1.86

The second (2015) gave a concentration of <12%, and a PH of 2.5-3.0.

My bottle is from 2019, so I am going to assume It has the properties described in the first document.
This is suitable for an A/B extraction right?

Thank you for sharing the documents with us.

You should be good using that as an acid. Distilled vinegar is roughly between 3-4.

One love

7-13% ? I suppose that's another way of saying 10±3%. The contrast with the 3 significant figures of pH value is somewhat amusing. This has made me curious to know what the actual concentration will be in your particular specimen (largely out of nerdiness).

Just for fun, we could calculate the concentration of a citric acid solution that would have a pH of 1.86. Does this correspond to somewhere within the range of 7-13% ?

(At this point, I'm probably supposed to type "Let's find out..." and then go through all the calculations, but tbh Loveall is better at that kind of stuff )