Edited to reflect the “no private jets”.???
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Haha I actually loved that comment though. I was visualizing the runways here full of potholes. Beautiful country but not always the smoothest landings
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I guess we should say So’sahel.
In lieu of So’cal.
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Decimal just finished commissioning a 6000 lbs./day, fully automated ethanol extraction facility for CBD isolate production. We have several smaller installations in EU (and Switz) and can manufacture to EU-GMP standards. DM if you’d like to learn more. Cheers
you’re using phase change to get solvent back at that scale?
…might make sense if one had geothermal & snow (see wrong place above)
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I think the Matrix is 6x4=24; type 7 being of some interest (11,12 if you throw in ammonium)
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Decimal…the game is CBDA…
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Did a few small scale experiments with some THCa biomass trying to replicate US20190359550A1 - Aqueous Leaching Method to Produce Microcrystalline Powder - Google Patents
I used sodium carbonate as the base, a little bit over ph 11, and citric acid. Instead of the described “microcrystalline powder” I got 700mg of THCa turds!
I thought this might be because I over acidified, so I tried again and was very careful to acidify just to around ph 6. I got an extremely fine off white powder that was very difficult to filter. After I managed to separate it, it also turned turd brown on exposure to air. This is what the filtrate looks like:
Its still opaque and has some tiny wisps of THCa that made it through the filter on the bottom. I suspect a lot of the THCa is still suspended. Maybe saponified cannabis fats are helping it stay emulsified.
I’m starting to think that rather then precipitating THCa it might make more sense to just L/L extract. Extract biomass with alkaline water > reduce volume with RO membrane > acidify & extract with nonpolar. And then recover solvent& try to crystalize.
I’m going to try an extracting ph around 10 next to see if that takes up less nasties from the plant and/or makes precipitation easier. If anyone wants to buy TurdTek© SOP please venmo me 100 thousand yuan.
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Careful filtration pre-acidifying will mitigate most of the colour bodies that precipitate.
I’ve tried the very careful pH swing thing when acidifying, it’s a real pain in the ass to get right.
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Is pH 6 a rabbit in the Hat trick?
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I figured THCa isn’t soluble in neutral water, so no real need to make it overly acidic. I added more citric after and didn’t notice any precipitate. I’ll add some HCl today and see if any solids decide to come out of hiding.
Thanks for the spoon, I’ll try it again with some activated carbon and see what happens.
How can you do water extraction if THCA is not soluble in water? Quo Vadis?
No, I meant I extracted with sodium carbonate solution and then acidified it to around ph 6 to precipitate the THCa
I’d suggest you go back and re-read that patent. There are a couple of things mentioned in there that most people miss. Whether they are important or not is left as an exercise to the reader.
There are absolutely things that are not disclosed in that document that we’ve found are critical for product quality.
I wasn’t referring to media filtration. I have heard that some carbons could possibly work well for this, some could not. I’m just a jarhead mechanical engineer and don’t understand the chemistry of it well enough to speak on the topic.
We have found that molecular exclusion techniques are quite effective in this area. The problem is finding filters that do what you want them to, that don’t dissolve or leach into your process liquid, and are affordable enough to justify their use.
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That is the “dirt” indeed.
It is one thing to get hydrates and another to get R-COOH as a crystal. and I can not think of anything more complicated than citric acid acidified NaOH solutions at neutral pH. I try not to.
But, I find most if not all Patents purposefully obfuscated ….and why not? If you are not coming from a strong biochemist background where all bio is regulated by protic, weak acid weak base interactions specifically tuned to physiological pH…what would an organic synthetic chemist really understand? So when everyone here who might think of himself as adapt at specific chemistry decides they are going to follow a patent directions using water…they run into a very simple problem inherent in all life systems…water. The landscape of these patents on water extraction covers and uses, protic nonpolar, to aprotic polar , to protic polar, to aqueous protic polar with pH control (steps). One has to be mindful of where you are at at any intermediate step as the “form” of the acid can change. There is one patent where the chemist uses such subtleties to separate THCA-B from THCA-A to achieve THCA purity of 99%+.
The patents in general are rather useless. There is an academic literature which describes “base extraction” of rescorcinols and rescorcinolic acids from plant materials that goes back nearly 80 years. Korte used such a plant extraction procedure in his original publication on isolation of THCA from marijuana/hash.
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