Heyo!
I’m using an etoh extraction setup, and was thinking about getting some in-line adsorbents to pull the max turpenes I can out of the ethanol. Then use co2 or pentane or soemthing to suck it out of the adsorbent afterwards.
My first thought was a coal/coconut charcoal as it does a pretty good job of flavour pulling. Anyone else have any thoughts?
I think @ScoobyDoobie suggested something on the color remdiation tek thread?
What I suggested was an ion exchange resin that was marketed specifically for adsorption and desorption of polyphenolic compounds. carotenoids and linalool removal were also stated as other compounds that could be separated with that resin.
It was the polysorb950, but what I was looking at is a company offering powders for retail to companies like Carbon Chemistry theres a good chance they’re not even going to reply to me if it doesnt appear to be a promising sales lead.
Carbon chemistry is probably a bad example since they source products and sell them to retailers but I think you get the idea.
You can certainly take a shot at using IEX for capturing terpenes but you would want to try a whole shit load of them or figure out the exact exchange properties…otherwise the terps are gonna ignore the rresin and stay with the solvent.
Resins normally come in 2 types and 4 major categories; sodium ion, chlorine ion, strong acid, weak acid, strong base, weak base.
I wouldnt just ignore something that actually works, I just avoid sourcing small amounts of stuff that probably won’t.
We do sell directly but only above a certain volume. That way retailers have a niche and so do we. Many if the products we sell can be obtained as a one time sample but the manufacturers have 100k kg minimums after that, lol.
I’m not saying the stuff would work one way or the other foe what we want, I was just stating that it said terpene removal was being advertised for that specific product from that company.
I trust that you’ve done your homework on this ion exchange resin stuff already and will have a good solution for us soon.
It did only say linalool removal so you probably would need different a ton of different resins to test with to effectively remove the different classes of terpenes.
My conceptual issue is the polar & non-polar issue with ethanol. Seems like it would be hard to get anything to stay with the adsorbent. I can see co2 being pretty perfect though.
In this case the polarity of the solvent isn’t the only factor to consider, ion exchange resins are far more selective than carbon or clay.
The day someone says, “This resin does the trick” I’m buying containers of it and making it both available and cost effective.
My research has shown that most IEX results are related to aqueous purification. If water is the solvent then its totally possible that IEX would grab some terps…but in a soup of non-polars IEX seems to have a hard time using ionic attraction to separate them from each other. I’ve been handing out samples of IEX specifically used in other industries to grab the EXACT color body compounds we want to remove and so far zero results that would make them commercially useful. Really hoping using those resins in butane does something special, otherwise I’m gonna have to go back to the drawing board.
Size exclusion is more interesting to me than ionic exchange. The molecular weights and sizes of things like lipids, chlorophyll, and phenols is already pretty well identified. If you were able to have a resin or matrix that could say only pass compounds between 280-320g/mol…then we’d be on to something.
I’ve looked into this too but wasn’t able to find a company that had products that separate compounds in the range of molecular weight compounds like the pigments.
But then I just work construction and researching this is a bit of a hobby for me so I make quite a bit of errors.
Evonik sent me a bunch of samples to play with when I asked about size exclusion…however, all of the damn products they sent require acid-base tuning to achieve affinity, not the direction I was trying to go at all. Imagine doping your oil solution so its buffered to 3pH just so some of your contaminant compounds stick…then changing pH to precisely 3.2 for another run, then 3.4, etc. @ScoobyDoobie
I know a couple guys/gals around here are using membranes for wax, and likely chlorophyll as well, exlusionary membranes are probably the way to go in the long run. Maybe once something fancy like graphene comes out we’ll all be laughing.
That does give me a bit of an idea though. We can dilute the ethanol down and the non-polar turpenes will float out. Then if we ran the low % etoh mix through the resin it might pull all the water soluble ones?
That is certainly a way to get terps back. You would have a ton of alcohol to redistill and proof up though. @tweedledew
Graphene is such an expensive option I doubt I’ll ever be trying it out.
But I was thinking the very same thing about dilute alcohol being useful for moving through a hydrated gel my real interest with the resins is in separating the terpenes using a solvent that will easily evaporate before the terpenes.
Because that’s something that’s not easily done by any other means.
Yeah… call me a glutton for punishment… but I wanted to do live resin with ethanol/co2 combo. So I’ve got some legwork infront of me.
@Shadownaught I own an alcohol distillery and got some good solvent recovery options available to me. Might save the multistage process for super-high end trim/bud or something of the like. I can at least recover 6litres per hour from 10% up to 95.8% on my setup, and with relative ease can bump that up to 10-15LPH.
A rechargeable graphene membrane might easily pay for itself even if a 2" disk costs well into the thousands of dollars though! Maybe this is the first industry that will be able to support it getting out of the lab!
Graphene nanoparticle membranes certainly are the future.
I’m not kidding when I say they’re far from my reach though.
Hmm $400/g
I bet I could make a filter that weighs 20g…
But i probably wouldn’t get it right the first time…
and then i’d be flat broke…
Now your feeling my pain.
Maybe teenie tiny filters, then bigger then bigger 
Would no doubt be cool to order 5g and make a tiny column then recreate it on a bigger scale if it works but frankly I think trying to tailor the affinity of the graphene nanoparticles is beyond the scope of what can be learned from reading online.
I think that’s technology that’s currently being developed, not anything like the old articles I read to the get anecdotal evidence I use to make the assumptions that I do 