I would like to get to processing 100lbs of material per day, but find myself spending a lot on dry ice to bring it down to temperature. Please relay some better options specifying/linking equipment if possible. Thank you!
You can grab a cryo on Ebay for less than 3k. Make sure your material is below 5c… ethyl is below 50c and you will be good to go. Hsippy extracting!
Fuck soaking. More impurities get picked up that way and you’ll have more SOPs before and between distillation passes. Setup like you would for bho extraction. Fill solvent tanks with ethanol and bring down to temp quickly with liquid CO2. Use jacketed tanks and columns. You can do a cold vapor assist with a co2 dewar or utilize a nitrogen assist. Only $200 for a nitrogen regulator. You can pass the solvent through 20 lbs of material very quickly which again is the goal…5 minutes tops. Only bottleneck would be the size of your rotovap if you wanna do 100 lbs a day.
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I found that less than 10 minutes residence time with cold (-40c) ethanol leaves too much target compounds behind. Also, a FFE or other thin film continuous flow evaporator design is far superior to a roto.
OP, LN2 or CO2 in a counter flow coil with the extraction solvent flowing through the opposite direction would be my next move. A chiller pumping through an immersion coil would work ok as well
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@Future is that without agitation?
Flowing (more?) solvent over the material like @Squid does might reduce boundary effects and give faster extraction than un-agitated vats. Don’t know. that’s why I got a CUP
I’m about to get my hands on a Delta and I’m hoping I’ll be able to chill the solvent beforehand. Hoping someone out here has some incite on the SOP. Seeing a lot of people hand over crude with plant matter and lipids in it that claim they are using the CUP and achieving really low temps. It’s obvious they didn’t use the inline filtration. If you got the temps low enough, would you even need the inline filter?
you absolutely need the in-line filter. mesh bags are not fine enough to catch all the plant matter…and the zippers will leak biomass too. I only got in a handful of runs before we shut down to get lab construction done. So I can’t currently tell you the best way to use it. Delta is telling folks to run it at rm temp, and then scrub.
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I haven’t found many effective LN2 crossflow heat exchangers that can deal with ambient process flows due to the Leidenfrost Effect, can you give some info on heat exchangers that would be effective in this situation?
OP, without an intimate understanding of your process my input isn’t that great, but I would suggest finding coolants that you can flow through your dry ice.
The heat transfer from solid dry ice, through a pipe, to whatever fluid is in the pipe is NOT efficient. A way to improve the efficiency is to cool a coolant in liquid dry ice and counterflow that solvent with your process fluid as @Future said.
There’s a lot of detail involved that could improve your cooling of the coolant, but at the end of the day: liquid is a better heat exchanging phase than solid.
Do you have a picture of your setup?
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So I can use my BHO equipment and instead just use ethanol?
So long as you understand the problem correctly…
I’ve even recovered my solvent in there so the boss couldn’t tell I wasn’t using ‘tane (we were no longer licensed for that).
Which do you prefer now ethanol or butane?
Solvent agnostic closed loop enthusiast
it’s about choosing the right solvent (system) for the task at hand.
a single solvent is rarely the correct response.
right now I’m processing hemp…ethanol is definitely getting the job done.
if you’re looking for an LN2 solution, we have one.
This product was originally developed for MIL/AERO applications but its high capacity (25kW @-90.0C) has enough thermal horsepower to pull down large volumes ot ethanol about as quickly as anything we’ve seen on the market: Thermonics Low Temp Chillers | Thermonics Process Chillers
The link above will show you the CryoChiller, but for extraction purposes, we have a configuration where the heat transfer fluid cools the ethanol in an external ethanol heat exchanger - see photo. Bob is our Chiller Product manager, you can contact him for more technical questions: sales@thermonics.com
Good Luck!
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