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Quantification of Dimethicone

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Thurbs:
Management has given me the task of developing a method to quantify dimethicone in in one of our new lip balm formulations, and I think I need a little help with it. The formula is 98.5% wax/oil and 1.5% dimethicone. My lab is pretty basic, but we have an FTIR and a range of solvents.

What I understand so far about dimethicone is that there are no chromophores, so my UV/vis HPLC is of no use. It is not volatile, so a GC would be no use. My FTIR software allows you to subtract one spectra from another, however, at 1.5%, the peak remaining at 1260cm-1 is very small when you subtract the placebo spectra from the full formula. 

Does anybody have any advice regarding a method of extracting dimethicone from an oil base?

Corribus:
FTIR isn't the greatest method for quantitative analysis to begin with, and it will be especially hard here because dimethicone is a polymer with variable molecular weight. I wonder if some kind of separation and/or gravimetric analysis might be a viable approach. Is the rest petroleum wax? Waxes may be separable from the siloxanes.

Thurbs:
FTIR isn't ideal, but so far it's all I have for detection. Unfortunately the formula consists of both triglycerides and petroleum waxes, and I haven't been able to find a way to chemically separate dimethicone. Gravimetric analysis using a centrifuge is something that I have been considering since dimethicone has a higher density than the other components. One method is to use a heated centrifuge to spin melted product. Another is to use a normal centrifuge to spin product that has been dissolved in acetone or similar solvent that dissolves everything but dimethicone. Both have potential I think, but I don't have a centrifuge yet, and then I will have the problem of getting the dimethicone out of the centrifuge tube without contamination.

Corribus:
I was thinking more along the lines of thermogravimetric residue analysis, using the completely unsubstantiated idea that pyrolysis of polysiloanes would leave behind silica, whereas pyrolysis of everything else would leave behind... practically nothing. I did a quick search and see that it's not such a crazy idea

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0141391005004568?via%3Dihub

If you don't have a good TGA but you can get your hands on a good muffle furnace or the equivalent, and you have a lot of the test material to play around with, you could just combust a lot of it and weigh the amount of residue left behind. Use the pure polysiloxane as a control, and then back correlate how much of it is in the original formulation using a weight ratio (residue in the pure stuff versus residue in the mixture). We've done this very successfully with organically modified silicate fillers in organic polymers. As long as your additive leaves behind a consistent measurable residue and all the other stuff doesn't, you're golden.

1.5% should be doable using an approach like that, as long as the polysiloxane leaves behind a sizeable fraction of its mass as silicate residue.

Thurbs:
It makes complete sense to me that silica is all that would remain after the pyrolysis of the sample material. We also have a muffle furnace that we use in our zinc oxide titrations.

I added ~100mg of dimethicone to a few crucibles and let them bake at 800C for an hour after a ramp rate of 10C/minute. Weight retention should have been 59.4% based on the weight percent of the methyl groups. However, actual retention was 43.8 and 46.7%, and there were faint white streaks up the inside of the crucible. Silica that remained in the crucible was such a fine powder that I think some of it simply floated away on convention currents. I wouldn't mind having a correction factor in whatever calculation I end up with, but I would need a consistent percentage of silica residue first. Considering that a typical sample size of 500mg would only leave me with 7.5mg of dimethicone to work with prior to pyrolysis, I would expect that variation to only increase.

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