Saponification (soap making) is the chemical process of producing glycerol and carboxylate salts from the reaction of fats or oils and a base. This carboxylate salt produced is soap. Typically, the fat used is a triglyceride, and the base is sodium or potassium hydroxide. A typical metric that quantifies this chemical process is the saponification number, the number of milligrams of KOH that has to be added in order to saponify 1 g of fat (or oil).

Figure 1. Example of saponification reaction.

A chemist prepares an experiment where two tanks are filled with ethyl acetate (CH₃COOC₂H₅) and sodium hydroxide (NaOH), respectively. These tanks have outlets, connected to pipes, that let their contents mix in a third tank (initially with a non-reactive and electrically neutral solution), where the saponification reaction occurs, creating acetate ion and ethanol.

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