Uses
Paint vehicles, source of rosin, alkyd resins,
soaps, cutting oils and emulsifiers, driers, flotation
agents, oil-well drilling muds, core oils, lubricants
and greases, asphalt derivatives, rubber reclaiming,
synthesis of cortisone and sex hormones, chemical
intermediates.
Definition
A mixture of rosin acids, fatty acids, and other materials
obtained by acid treatment of the alkaline
liquors from the digesting (pulping) of pine wood;
flash p 360F (182C). Combustible.
General Description
Oily yellow liquid. Less dense than water and insoluble in water. Hence floats on water. Obtained by acidifying the alkaline liquors obtained from digesting pine pulp.
Air & Water Reactions
Insoluble in water.
Reactivity Profile
TALL OIL are weakly acidic.
Origin of Name
Tall is the Swedish word for pine, and the term tall oil is an American adaptation of tallolja, a Swedish product name associated with the kraft pulping process and with products from the fractional distillation of crude tall oil.
Abbreviations of basic tall oil names and common analyses often used in publications and reports are: Crude tall oil (CTO); Tall oil fatty acids (TOFA); Tall oil rosin (TOR); Distilled tall oil (DTO); Tall oil pitch (TOP); and Heads, light ends (H).
Production Methods
Pine wood contains an extractable fraction, ≈3%, consisting of free and combined fatty and rosin acids and nonacidic compounds (tall oil components). In the alkaline pulping process the tall oil components are saponified into a soapy material that, when acidulated, gives a mixture of free rosin and fatty acids and neutral components—crude tall oil (CTO). CTO is refined mainly by vacuum distillation processes to separate the various compounds almost completely into rosin and fatty acid fractions.
The rosin part of CTO is a complex mixture of rosin acids, a threering fused system with the empirical formula C20H30O2. The tall oil fatty acids, primarily C18 types, are similar in composition to those derived from soybean oil. The neutral constituents of tall oil—predominantly esters, sterols, and hydrocarbons—are generally regarded as troublesome “impurities” that impair its utilization and distillation.
Flammability and Explosibility
Nonflammable
Industrial uses
Different fatty acids used as collectors are mainly a mixture of oleic, linoleic, conjugated linoleic, palmitic and stearic acids. In the mineral industry, these fatty acids are known as tall oils. Actually, crude tall oils are converted by distillation into oils suitable as flotation collectors.
Tall oils are widely used for flotation of phosphates, lithium minerals
(spodumene), silicates and rare-earth minerals (i.e. bastnaesite, monazite) where gravity
separation is not possible because of the small size of the minerals. These collectors perform
well on ores with simple gangue compositions and free from clay and slimes.
