Should I be using and ultrasonic homoginizer to mix my Terps and distillate for making pod carts? Would this be total overkill or should I just buy a magnetic stir hotplate from amazon? Right now I’m just heating stuff in a water bath and stirring with a glass rod but I dont like the water being near my product cause it will cause it to be cloudy if any gets in my product. How do most people heat and mix distillate for carts?
Magnetic stirrer hot plate for the win. No water it’s the best also.
The device ur speaking of is for emulsion, you just need a proper mixing w disty plus terps
For large quantities, an overhead stirrer will work better then a magnetic one
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A high shear homogenizer is your best bet- you don’t need ultrasound, and with volatiles like terps you should stick with the gentlest possible method to get the job done.
Ultrasonics have a lot of great uses but I have always seen them as massive overkill for canna industry applications, and because the industry tends to spring for low quality tools more often than not, I find the industry/techie fetishization of ultrasound a bit worrying.
Low quality probes have been found to leech metal micro particles into samples, this might not be a deal breaker for some industries, but we are producing consumables here!
The amount of energy generated by the probes and infused into samples also leaves a large degree of instability. Ultrasonics don’t produce stable emulsions and lasting nano encapsulations in comparison to other methods, namely extrusion and chemical treatment (bile salts, surfactants)
nano encapsulation is pretty serious business, and allows for totally benign substances to become very potent and work on the human body in ways that we as an industry do not fully appreciate- most formulators just want a water solubilized oil, and forget that in order to absorb this so called 10x bioavailable compound it has to be absorbed not in the gut but through a mucus membrane- so they treat it as 10x potency while the user is just swallowing the product- we now have gone backwards and seen a 10x loss in potency of the Medicine if the formulator even cared to adjust the dosage to account for this.
I think the industry as we see it today is simply not educated and skilled enough to really wield the tech without serious risks to the consumer.
My 0.02 cents tho
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Every sonotrode will shed metal particles. It’s why they are consumable pieces of equipment and is a consequence of cavitation. Filtration after exposure is not optional. It’s the wrong tool for this job.
@Rowan Emulsions produced with ultrasonics are extremely stable if formulated correctly. I have some translucent formulations that haven’t broken in almost a year now. The benefit of high energy applications is that you can use significantly less surfactant than spontaneous/thermodynamically stable variants, like a microemulsion. The bioavailability stuff only kicks in if you’re making sub 100nm nanoemulsions (nanoemulsion is a misnomer btw and the definition isn’t even 100% agreed upon in the literature yet, microemulsions usually have smaller particle sizes, the name comes from the mechanism of stability). Every formulation I make is sterile filterable (I.e sub 220nm diameter) but not every formulation is translucent or has the properties sonomechanics and other manufacturers of ultrasonic equipment would lead you to believe is required for a stable nanoemulsion.
Also, it’s worth noting that ultrasonics are much cheaper than high pressure homogenizers, and at the scale required for the cannabis industry, ultrasonics have better throughput too.
Edit: also wanted to say that I hate the bullshit about bioavailability. I think it’s crazy that people are putting less of the active ingredient in and claiming it’s just as effective when we don’t have any real data for cannabis specific applications. When sales people ask me about that for their sales sheets and stuff, I always tell them to leave that stuff out.
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