I’m trying to wrap my head around effectively and efficiently cleaning a closed-loop system. Aside from concerns about product carryover, bacterial and fungal contamination, etc–it’s just good practice to clean your process vessels after each use–especially if its a batch process.
I have some ideas that i’d like some insight on, if you care to read:
Run your hydrocarbon through the vessel without any biomass in it. Run it warm, so that solubility of residues is increased.
Pros:
Simple
Doesn’t require assembly/disassembly
Added benefit of re-distilling solvent to check its cleanliness
Cons:
Requires multiple solvent passes
Vessel geometry may not allow for complete cleaning
Creates more uptime for CLS–therefore increases operating risk overall
Clean with HOT Alconox and rinse with RO several times.
Pros:
No solvent distillation required
Ability to reach every crevice in the system
Ability to control residue with number of rinses
Cons:
Adding water to the system that will be difficult to remove (especially around gaskets)
Possiblity of not removing contaminants usually removed by butane
something that helps clean honey pots is to close off all ports and let the butane evaporate and recondense inside the honey pot with the heater on —- itll clean it all out except for bottom of pot —- i do this in between runs when i have to replenish my solvent tank —- i add, distill my tane and clean about 95% of the pot — after i just take the cover off and pour alcohol to clean the bottom.
When your cleaning your CLS with your extraction gas, please understand that butane is NOT an efficient disinfectant, sanitizer or antimicrobial agent. It does not kill bacteria very well.
Some may say “LYSOL has butane, so it must work”, but it’s strictly there as a propellant, nothing more.
Using butane to disinfect your CLS is like washing your dirty socks with bath water and expecting them to smell good after.
this is what I do too, doesn’t make sense to do anything else. A cleaning usually requires getting your hands in there and cleaning. I haven’t cleaned my lines or fittings yet but they also don’t seem like they need it.
I wipe the stainless out after every run and let it dry before re-assembling it and storing it under vac
50 #'s is batch size for testing requirments in cali. Really doesn’t take long to break the system down, wipe it down and reassemble. I make the minions wash the CRC components every run before assembling and pouring powders.
