I recently got a “no new inventions” probation lol. I guess they didn’t notice the enormous rotovap condenser we built afterwards lol… I wonder if the ruse will be up when they see this week’s crude throughput.
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right, but that wasn’t new, it just took a while for the parts to arrive.
you documented that here…
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Ahh yes, this seems like a reasonable excuse! Just completing the old projects we’re barely ever began. You know, spirit of the whole deal lol
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it’s either that or threaten to find a boss who appreciates your creative side 
and I can’t see a boss who drags home a bucket of ultrasonic horns and expects you to make them sing actually being serious about curtailing your “inventions”.
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No, of course not lol. I love our company and couldn’t find better people to work with. More of a gentle reminder that the new inventions actually need to be run every once in a while lol. That and they want me doing that miserable part of the job that involves engaging with people outside a lab or machine shop (the horror)
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sooo…is it only “counter-flow” if both the solvent and the cannabis are moving?
the batch style implementation of “counter-flow”, as seen in (say) Bucket Tek (Cold Ethanol Extraction on a Budget) or Data: potent & efficient lipid infusions via percolation (21 g batches) seems less “flowy” than packing a tube full of cannabis and pumping solvent round in circles as fast as you can for as long as it takes (eg pinnacle’s etoh skid, or my CRC if it get’s it’s way…)
At some point what happens if you do this is the solvent gets saturated to the point where you are re-depositing oil at the same rate as dissolving it. At that point, the only option is to removed the solvent and hit it with more solvent.
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is the purpose just to agitate material? If so, why not just recirculate within the column vs the whole loop?
You could tee off the lines to create a loop in a loop
yep. can’t argue with that logic.
Except, that’s not what I meant by
(my bad!!)
I’m suggesting taking 25lb of solvent and running it in a loop (with heat exchange to keep it cold) at 10lb a min. so both extractions are into the same amount of solvent (25lb). one is a 10 min soak. one is 5 min with flow.
my expectation is the shorter run will yield better. assuming channelling is not a huge issue.
that has certainly been my experience with ethanol.
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from top of column to bottom of column, through pump.
sure, you could make the argument that flow and agitation have similar effects on the boundry layer and concentration gradients. it would be over my head.
screaming at it (ultrasonics) could also be looked at as kind of like agitation too. at least some of the effect, if I understand correctly.
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ohh. nope, those were single tube systems. Just recirculating on itself… I see what youre saying now.
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Given that the material is fully saturated and essentially “soaking” during the recirculation, I think it’s a no brainer that moving solvent is going to have a higher efficacy. Whether that’s enough to cut the time in half or not is hard to say.
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if you had the choice to recirculate vs not, and didn’t see a yield increase with recirculate, that is absolutely a data point.
I’ll grasp for the nearest straw and say, “but you were running at rm temp right?”
shit’s a little less soluble at -70C…
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The trick with the solvent is to get it homogenously saturated. Agitation and mixing are good for making sure the solvent in proximity to the solutes isn’t more saturated than the bulk. Now, with solvent flowing straight through the column, this is something we want initially, but partway through the pull, we don’t actually want to mix our previously laden solvent with the newly formed boundary layer solvent because the later is actually less concentrated than the former. This is the general principle with percolator style extractors.
In a pinch though, I still thinking pumping it in circles does more benefit than harm
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Room temp yes. Ice cold at best after a run or two.
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the real object of the game is to get the yield up without increasing times.
imo a 10 min soak with “covered” (which is 25lb to 5lb biomass) is not enough solvent nor enough time…but running another 25lb of solvent takes more time than the extra yield justifies (not my math, but having done it a couple of times I tend to agree) and soaking longer just takes, well you know, longer…and effects quality if you’re using vacuum jackets rather than actively chilled jackets on your columns.
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yeah this ^^^
having built a two column recirculating CRC with a liquid pump and post magic dirt bag filter, the concept of NOT putting two bags of weed in there and comparing recirculate to soak seems rather irresponsible.
…it takes the same size bags.
Edit: that would explain what the 12X12 jacketed honey pots that showed up from the past on Friday are for…
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I think it’s only fair to science that it be pursued
The one I want to do with our percolator is pull samples from the micelle every couple of minutes and see when the solute concentration plateaus
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Im actually out of the loop on the recirc CRC… can you link me
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maybe @Soxhlet and @Indofab can show you (more) pictures of theirs…
https://www.instagram.com/p/B76pBHwhR_t/
I think @Photon_noir explained the concept in the Opaline Silica Thread and there are probably pictures of the dual 3" unit I built based on his work.
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