A guide to making your own membrane skid for not very much money

To understand extraction, here’s a short list of topics you should try to understand well enough to explain to a non-expert.

Solubility and solubility curves
Miscibility
Polarity

Once you understand the fundamentals of extraction well enough, you’ll understand why the spray wash method is quite effective at producing “crude” products that need minimal post-extraction refinement, and why that process was designed the way it was.

Then, study and understand filtration and separation.

Depth filtration
Size-based exclusion
Absorption
Adsorption
Precipitation
Distillation
Crystallization

This combined with the extraction topics should help you understand the 101 of membrane systems - and almost every other thing we do around here - and why they are designed the way they are, and what you need to know/ask about when selecting vendors.

A dedicated month or three of learning should get you to the point where you can find your own answers, ask intelligent questions of experts in this field, and be far less likely to get taken for a very expensive ride by someone who talks fast and slick but doesn’t actually know what they’re talking about.

Looking for books with “handbook” in the title will probably speed up your learning.

Good luck.

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…and checking over in the data dump might reduce your acquisition costs…

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Do you have a guide to membrane/solvent compatibility?

I’m exploring green solvents for extraction and a lot of these green solvents have weird compatibilities.

I know CO2 is considered green, but assume I can’t do that.

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I’ve been interested in trying CO2 for a long time. I don’t think there’s really any literature on the subject. Just about every liquid solvent has some kind of compatibility data on it. I wouldn’t assume CO2 isn’t compatible. The bigger challenge is the logistics of how to run the CO2 through efficiently and safely.

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