we have a industrial scale high performance liquid chromatography machine to make thc free distillate, but we have a problem about the solvents recovery, we use reversed phase chromatography, 80% methanol and 20%water as the mobile phase, after the chromatography, we use rotovap to remove the solvents, then get thc free distillate.
we truly want to to recover the methanol to reuse, is it possible to use a rotovap or falling film evaporator to separate the methanol from the solutions? If not, is there some machine can make this?
Beautiful setup! Tell us more about you, and your operation @lmscientific !! Welcome to our community! I use a rotary evap at my scale and it works for separating meoh, and water.
You could do a simple distillation in a falling film, allowing the vapor path to pass through a column of sieve beads. That should do a good job of removing any water vapor that co distills with your methanol, if you’re having that problem.
Even without forming as azeo, alcohol and water generally need multiple theoretical plates or multiple simple distillations to get above 90% depending on what your starting concentration is. At 80% you can get it over 90% with one distillation, but the most efficient way to get 99% is with plates.
^ On That point, you’re going to be spending more time and money trying to get the methanol back to the purity you need than it’s going to be worth with methanol at $8/gallon.
If the process takes 80% methanol and 20% water, then recover through ffe, resulting in 97% methanol. Why then can we not add 17% water to get the ratios back to 80/20 to reuse in next run?
We are also trying to figure this out. Thank you @imscientific for bringing up this problem.
Were at a point where it’s either find a solution or prepare for solvent evaporation.
