Consultant

Looking for a consultant on a ethanol lab. I’m looking to source only machines with low lead times. Also looking to extract at warm temp if possible.

Interesting. I would love to hear the benefits of that. Always done cryo here.

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If you need short lead times you’ll need to think outside the box and/or get lucky on used equipment.

Location? Scale?
Budget? Desired endpoint?

Assuming distillate is your end point, unless you’re hopping to bring back RSO.

Have you made distillate from crude extracted with rm temp ethanol? It’s a lot more work than leaving most of the junk behind by doing the extraction cold.

It can certainly be done, but knowing what you’re getting into before committing to that route seems prudent.

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I recently had someone come through my facility, ramblings about using room temp or hardly chilled isopropyl and not pulling any undesirables. I hadn’t heard this directly from his mouth, only down the grapevine. I am really interested in this, I call shenanigans and erroneous on all accounts, until I see it personally.

Lulz

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Dunno why one would be using iso, that just seems like a bad idea all around.
But room temperature with minimal undesireables should certainly be possible. I know someone who has done it via chemical means in a lab scale, and I’m working on an industrial scale design to achieve the same goals.

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Yep, but it is really hard to do that right at any reasonable scale.

Without turning up gravity 1000x or so. :slight_smile:

Have you acquired your test sled or analytical tools? I should order a new GC column now so I can start grabbing data as soon as I’m back in OR.

Nope. But a little bird told me santa might just be showing up late this year, with a shiny new GC and a pair of test sleds and a lab to play with them in, some time in jan/feb if all goes well.

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The lab I consultant with runs warm. Running warm isn’t always a bad thing.

For example, you never have to worry about mycotoxins running warm.

Running warm def pulls out bad shit that you don’t want in distillate (but can be removed), but at the same time, it requires a “carbon scrub” and filtration through a silica bed.

As comparison, it’s like using a .25 micron filter paper, and assuming you are using ethanol or iso above 70% (140 proof) mold wont emulsify.

Pros and Cons to every technique.

You never have to worry about mycotoxins when running warm?

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Read the full thing. It depends on a couple factors:

#1 Type of alcohol used (had to be above 70% so it does not emulsify)
#2 How many times its filtered, and what micron. In my example, doing a carbon scrub with a silica bed is like using a .25 micron paper.

Mycotoxins and mold spores are two different things.

I’m curious how emulsification plays a role as well…?

Mold and fungus produce mycotoxins. It’s literally the poison that mold and fungus create. Thus the concern with mycotoxins, mold, and fungus.

Mold emulsifies with alcohol that is between 40-70% (80-140 proof) purity, which is why people use rubbing alch (70%) to clean mold in their showers. In this context, it would pollute your alcohol and can pass through to later stages of production.

Your right mycotoxins are produced my mold spores but removing one doesn’t remove the other, which is what I was getting at.

Your saying mycotoxins emulsify in alcohol or mold spores?

First step is removing the cause. Thus mold and fungus.

Mold spores will emulsify in alcohol that is low purity, which is bad.

A VAST majority of mycotoxins are removed from carbon scrubbing (it literally cleans it the liquid). Think charcoal (which is mostly pure carbon) air purifiers and water purifiers.

Lastly, once loaded into a short path, the heat from a short path alone will kill approximately 50% of known mycotoxins. 50% of mycotoxins are destroyed via high temps, significantly lower than the temps we distill at.

I’ve read graphene has a very high affinity for mycotoxins but I’ve never heard of activated charcoal being used effectively, I’d be interested to read about that if u could point me to a white paper.

I believe that in a thread about mycotoxins people were talking about the fact that yes you can heat the mycotoxins to a point and destroy them but it’s not like they just evaporate… they decompose into other chemicals which may be more or less toxic themseleves.

I believe it was @ExTek90 who was saying that mycotoxin contaminated distillate has distinctive smell and that smell is carried thru thw short path.

Here’s that post

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We’ve used warm alch 247, haven’t changed our process (always carbon scrubbed), and all our cat 2 tested clean for cat 3. And i know for a fact (visible) there was mold on some of the trim we were given.

I dont have a paper to direct you to saved, but I read up a lot about it before the regs hit.

And yes, I also know for a fact that if you heat your oil (slowly obviously) above 100 degree F, mycotoxins begin to die. Again, only about 50% of them will die from this method and they will remain in the bulb. There’s a lot of factors as to how it could pass into a fraction, but if your running your short path correctly, under proper vacuum and slowly increasing temps, I don’t see how it would ever get into a fraction.

Its the byproduct of your pasteurization that will end up in the distillate not the mycotoxin itself.

First off, just to clarify, I don’t know if the toxins carry over or not, and I certainly don’t know if there is a smell associated. I’m not sure I’ve ever dealt with them.

We need some tests done to verify anything.

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This is what had me thinking it passed with the distillate, I’m always assuming :zipper_mouth_face:

Whether they concentrate into the target fraction or the raffinate is still up in the air, unfortunately.