I think i’m doing this right. Below is a link to the paper in the Malaysian Journal of Analytical Sciences regarding extracting mitragynine from the Kratom (Mitragyna Speciosa) plant.
A Simple and Effective Isolation and Purification of Mitragynine from Mitragyna Speciosa Korth (Ketum) Leaves
www.ukm.my/mjas/v15_n1/Goh.pdf
I would steer clear of the picric acid…for numerous reasons.
Picnic acid is a cheap an easily made reagent. When you consider the source being the Malaysian journal of analytical chemistry I’m not surprised. Just because trinitrophenol is an explosive does not make it inherently bad,it just requires serious safety.
The point was not to provide an SOP but to illustrate chloroform as an extraction solvent for certain kratom alkaloids.
But yes picric acid (trinitrophenol) Is an explosive, a secondary mind you, but still an explosive. Though the picrate salt of mitragynine does not share this property. Also picric acid in solution is much more stable.
Dont throw the baby out with the bathwater is what I’m getting at.
numerous reasons…in addition to explosive aspects…
my main concern : read the MSDS health “benefits”.
If you notice in the original article there is a further step to produce the free base by back extraction and frees it from the picarate.
Any chemist thinking about making a product for human consumption would avoid the picric acid use.
The article is actually very interesting. I like it…Obviously the n-Hexane-chloroform is the way to go for first step .
Dried Crude at this stage is 70%. Redissove in ethylacetate or a pentane ethlacetate mixture…roto vap, to free it of hexane-chloroform residules…and you are ready to sell at gas stations and pop stands. Assuming it is legal to do so in Australia?
The whole purification by crystalization to 99% seems unecessary.
i.e., aqueous tea infusions.
Quo vadis?
The Malaysian paper works well, once it was scaled up, the amount of time spent in the soxhlet for deffating shot through the roof, so we had to go another route, concentrations of around 30% where repeatable but 70% took more time than it was worth.
I can just see the picrate going to TNT in wook hands…
Picric acid is a lot like either peroxides, and high capacity magazines. That few times they where a problem started a bonfire in the brains of the ignorant. I try to never suppress knowledge especially amongst the wooks.
I’d be genuinely impressed if a wook could legitimately turn trinitrophenol into TNT.
Had to add this in.
Read under uses it claims “complexes of picric acid are used in the field of homeopathy” quite an incendiary discovery and i felt compelled to share.
I’m sure that hydroxyl is sterically hindered to fuck, but if anyone can do it unintentionally it would be a wook
If I may ask - at what scale did you guys work at?
To me the 13:1 L:S ratio twice is already non-scalable. Especially in a dual solvent system.
I really see no point in degumming/dewaxing stage because at an industrial level you are left with an extra solvent to recover + there is no way you would escape the Acid/Base LLE further down the line. So why defat/degum in first place if you could use the chemical properties of alkaloids?