Wondering if pentane yields much better efficency in terms of % crystallized than longer chain hydrocarbons like heptane, or if the preference for pentane simply due to its lowered BP and this simpler and easier purge
I think it has to do with pentane’s poor affinity for cannabinoids
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Pentane is super weird with solubility and temp change.
You basically have to warm it up to get it to dissolve cannabinoids easily.
Then once you crash it its solubility drops and boom.
@Krative can chime in on this
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You have to get the longer alkanes to lower temps to achieve a similar crash efficiency, but this usually leads to THC thickening and coalescing on the forming crystals in the trials I’ve done.
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It’s all a balance, you can achieve the same exact same efficiency but time taken and crystal morphology will all change depending on solvent, temp, time, seeding, etc.
Basically what @Krative said^^^^
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Pentane is really easy to evaporate at a steady rate without agitation. It makes for some very nice room temperature work.
@anon6488101 did a CBD isolate experiment this week with Hexane – we didn’t have any pentane to play with at the time.
We followed Future’s SOP exactly (except with hexane) and it seems to have worked really well. I think the key is how slowly you bring the temperature down. It was snowing outside, so we let the solution come to room temp in the lab, then brought it outside for a few hours and you could already see crystals forming, and then from outside to the regular fridge (to be honest I’m not even sure if there was much of a temp change here), from the fridge to the -80 Freezer. Definitely not our most controlled experiment, but that being said, the hexane still seemed to work really well.
I finally got my hands on some Pentane so we did the wash yesterday, and upon initial inspection it seems we had about a 70% yield. I’m sure if we did a better job with keeping everything clean and really controlling the temp change more exactly, we could probably see higher yields.
Adina would like to try again with pentane and see which one is better. I will say the hexane didn’t yield any “easy to work with” mother liquor, there wasn’t enough of it to pour off before washing with pentane, so we had to just wash everything. Dropping off a sample of it tomorrow to find out purity, so I’ll keep you posted.
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You cN crash out anything with some ln2, why wait?
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Inclusions
How saturated does a solution need to be to freeze precipitate cannabinoids like that?
1:6 is standard
Less means more inclusions
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Lots of inclusions but seems like a fool proof way to perform some degree of separation. A wonderful starting point. @Thedistillator
I wonder how well ethane would work as the solvent in that situation… its my understanding that being a smaller molecule, ethane has a lesser capacity to dissolve compounds and so reaches a point of saturation faster than butane or propane.
Should be able to end up having a much less viscous mother liquor to deal with at those freezing temps by using ethane. This should help with inclusions.
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