Is alcohol acidic or alkaline

Alcohol plays a very important role in medicine. First of all, the main function of alcohol is disinfection. Before surgery or if you have a wound on your body, you can use alcohol to disinfect. In addition, if you have a fever that does not go away for a long time, you can apply alcohol to your body to reduce the temperature. So, is alcohol acidic or alkaline?

Ethanol, also known as alcohol, has a molecular formula of CH3CH2OH and a relative molecular mass of 46.07. It is a colorless, transparent liquid that is volatile, has a pungent taste, is easy to burn, has a boiling point of 78.5°C, a flash point of 11.7°C, and is miscible with water in any proportion. The volume fraction of commercially available medical ethanol is generally not less than 94.58%. pH value is neutral.

The grain is always in an acidic environment during the fermentation process, so the finished liquor is acidic. When measured with pH test paper, the color of the test paper is yellowish and the acidity value is approximately between 5-6. The pH value of beer is generally around 4.0-5.5. The pH value of general rice wine is 3.5-4.5.

Liquor is an acidic substance, while some of the wine we drink in our lives is alkaline. Therefore, for the sake of our own health, we should drink less liquor, especially patients with stomach problems, who should reduce the number of times they drink.

Acidic substances can cause great harm to our human body when used excessively. Therefore, after drinking, you can try to drink more hot water to relieve the stomach acid reaction in your body, thereby reducing the possibility of greater damage to your body.

Chemically, ethanol is a weak acid. Like phenol, it can react with Na. But it is less acidic than water. In fact, I only realized that water is also weakly acidic when I studied organics. In the aqueous solution of ethanol, a small amount of H+ will be ionized, but there will be no OH-, so if we have to say it, it can be said to be acidic, but the concentration of H+ produced is so low that it can be almost ignored and can be considered neutral.

Uses of alcohol:

1. When a child is sick and has a fever, wiping alcohol on the body can have a good fever-reducing effect, but you need to choose medical alcohol when wiping.

2. Disinfection and sterilization. When we get an injection or an IV drip, the doctor will take an alcohol cotton ball and disinfect the area where we are going to get the injection with alcohol first!

3. Alcohol is used to wipe some stubborn stains, which has a very good decontamination effect. The marks left by markers and ballpoint pens on clothes can also be easily removed!