For those not familiar with polar protic solvents and pH manipulation.Finally someone from Academia has found pay dirt…about 6 years later than Industry Patents.
It is nice work.
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Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t this just using water/alcohol for leaching with no pH manipulation? They refer to prior work with high pH and pulling conjugate bases. Is the benefit presented here just reduced flammability? What would be the extraction, stripping and precipitation steps that follow and why are they better than what people are doing now?
Let me relook at that particular paper. I know what you are talking about..It is all polar protic. I have in recent years been exploring the ethanol, propanol and methanol mixtures.
There are patents from 2018 onward that cover both straight forward base water , pH 12-13, with or with out addion of saline , AND patents on polar protic with aqueous.alcohol mixtures, and how to adjust you subsequent steps.
This group published two paper recently, I hope I didn’t copy the wrong doi…
Your last question is a bit confusing. Do you mean what advatages are there to polar protic vs non-polar ? Or what are the different variations of Polar Protic.
Remember the biomass creates it own buffer and the pKa change when using any thing but pure water.
OK..edit now includes former leaching as you say, and the 2025 base water.. thanks..
When using the simple H20 EtOH mixtures, you have residual water , and biomass buffered pH to contend with. If you want to try to understand what you are actually doing , I would try to get a handle on conformer states of salicylic acids and salicylates in the pH range of 2-6 . And if base water is in use…that includes pH 2-13 plus. Now I am only discussing the carboxylic acid forms here. (Nothing to do with the decarboxylated forms.)
Within certain mixtures…water alcohol and cannabinoic acids form “Ternary Complexes”. If you are not familiar with these opaque white assemblies,(often referred to as Louches) you will need to do a bt of work. They also spontaneously form from the decarboxylated neutral-cannabinoids.
What you do with your extracts after making the primary biomass extraction step, all depends on what you intend to make. The past 5 years or so, I have stressed that things go a lot easier if you start with sifted trichomes. If I were you , have your favorite bot do a comprehensive literature search of the Patent indexes for water extraction claims. Then tailor your steps in conjunction with what you really want. And use Trichomes.
I have been interested in wound healing, analgesia and the ppar-gama nuclear reprogramming aspects of the cannabinoic acids. But the new laws with the 2018 Farm Bill modifications, make research a bit difficult in the near future.
With respect to hoping to get some sort of crystalline cannabinoic acid: Nonpolar, aprotic , (butane /propane) may crash out pure cannabinoic acids…but you will not find such “freaks of nature” utilizing polar protic…waters and alcohols…getting that 'form" may not be worth the effort if you are just going to compound your acid into a formula cream, paste or edible mixture.
Apologize about the wrong doi…and thanks for pointing it out.
Regards…
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I guess I’m thinking in terms of large scale industrial API production. Crystalline solids are hard to beat in terms of shelf stability, purity and ease of handling, so I am inclined to think of that as the end goal and this would be a first step to an LLE process. For a home user, sonicating sift in vodka would be incredibly simple system for making oral or topical THCa.
Or, just pure grain alcohol diluted to your favorite mix with water.
LLE to non polar is standard.