Some distillate I made has these bubbles or droplets in it and I am wondering if anyone has seen anything similar or have ideas as to what they might be. I thought I had taken more pics but I only have these two and they kind of suck. I’ll take better ones tomorrow.
Pics:
This is 1st pass distillate from -80C ethanol extraction of trim. Some thoughts I’ve had:
I don’t think it’s vacuum grease. I’ve gotten vac grease in distillate before and it looked much different. And since that incident I use such a small amount of grease, it seems unlikely that could have caused this.
Could be heads I suppose. There’s no cloudiness or streakiness (despite the first picture looking very cloudy - it’s just a bad picture) though, which is what heads contamination normally looks like in my experience.
Could be air bubbles I suppose, but I don’t know why there would be so many. Vac depth was sub 100 micron the entire run.
Tomorrow will try to heat the distillate up and get it nice and fluid and see what that does. Then 2nd pass I guess.
2 Likes
It’s heads.
Run your heads portion until no weird little droplets come down with your distillate, it should be easy enough to see.
1 Like
Hopefully that’s the case since it’s a pretty easy fix. It’s my 2nd run on this SPD set up, so I’m not used to the parameters on it yet. But I have had heads contamination before and it looked much different.
See this post/thread showing the pics of disty that has thin wispy white cloudy streaks. Thoughts on why this looks different?
Also, based on the quantity of bubbles it seems that they were coming over throughout the entirety of the distillation, or at least most of it. I noticed a few at the start then kinda stopped paying close attention. But the bubbles seem to be in both the top and bottom of the flask. Which would be odd if it was heads contamination.
1 Like
Not 100% certain on the fix
Maybe take your heads off slowly, and add a bit of packing to your column (steel scrubber/zeolite pellet) to get better resolution between fractions
2 Likes
Run your second pass slower and a lil longer, its heads it maybe some co distilled heavy terps. I get them often and they come out in the second pass, especially if your doing a hot condenser for first its fairly common
1 Like
