Thiamine Hydrochloride

Thiamine is also known as vitamin B1. It is used for converting food to energy in your body (so it is neccesary). To synthesize thiamine would be of great difficulty and your greatest option would be to extract it from vitamin B1 supplements. The extraction can range from rather easy to medium difficulty depending on what other crap is in the supplement. In supplements it is often found as the hydrochloride salt.

Extraction:

The brand I have purchased, which is called "Nature Made", contains 100mg of thaimine per table. The thiamine found is here is the hydrochloride salt though, so there will be more than 100mg of thaimine hydrochloride per tablet. There are 100 tablets in this bottle so there is at least 10grams of pure thiamine in one bottle. Since everyone will find different brands which contain different impurities, I will discuss not only how to extract it from this brand, but how to figure out what to use to extract it from other brands.

Analysis:

This is the ingredients list of the bottle:

Dibasic Calcium Phosphate, Thiamine Hydrochloride, Cellulose Gel, Hydroxypropyl Methylcellulose, Magnesium Stearate

We now must look up the MSDS of each of those to find the solubilities in water. I found the following data:

Ingredient	Solubility in water
Dibasic Calcium Phosphate (CaHPO4)	Insoluble
Thiamine Hydrochloride	100grams/100ml (1gram per ml of water)
Cellulose Gel	Information explains that it forms an insoluble gel with water
Hydroxypropyl Methylcellulose	Soluble, but the extent of is unknown
Magnesium Stearate	Insoluble

 

 

 

 

 

The only straight-forward ingredients are Dibasic Calcium phosphate and Magnesium Stearate. Methylcellulose and its polymers can often be soluble in cold water, but insoluble in hot water and that specific polymer has no detailed data on its solubility. The cellulose gel is insoluble, but the gell might slow filtration or even prevent the thiamine HCl from dissolving. If all else fails, basification might be possible, but the solubility of the freebase is unknown. The plan of attack is to powder the pills and then dissolve them in some hot water. Then, find out a way to seperate the Hydroxypropyl Methylcellulose.