So I recently cleaned up and reduced all my extra cleaning solvent laying around, and also included a run of crude that didn’t finish distilling and had to get stopped early for other reasons. The cleaning reclaim was from cleaning glassware, surfaces, crude spills, etc.
I went through all the filtration steps and this shit smelled extra funky and gross. While distilling it, the lower temp volatiles came off as expected. I wasn’t anticipating much decarbing, since at least 40% of the material had already been partially boiled. But when I started getting into 140-180 C temp on the mantle, I was getting excessive foaming and bubbling, to the point that I had to resort to partial vacuum, for many hours. It never stopped off-gassing and decarbing. I even was able to get it to settle after 4 hours or so, and at around 180 C, I was finally able to go to full vacuum and almost immediately starting hitting green heads fractions. But the reaction died down and I climbed up to 190 C and it started foaming again, much more than I expected, and without a bump trap, I accidentally contaminated my whole vapor path.
What could be causing all this off gassing? It is pissing me off. I normally decarb before SPD, but even when I don’t it takes maybe 1.5-2 hours to decarb a bigger batch of raw crude inside the SPD. I got annoyed and turned it all off for cleaning, and gonna run some fresh crude to make me feel better, haha. But has anyone had an experience like this with any bad crude or reclaim oil?