I want to cut down on solvents by either only buying hexane or only buying ethane. I would like to know which version of the dewaxing would be most effective. I believe chromatography would be the superior method.
How could it be superior? What scale do you think you could apply chromatography to?
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I mean, I did manage to take some room temperature garbage, and with a single chromatography pass brought it from a likely 40-50% up to 75+%.
Winterizing is just real cheap and easy. But chromatography is pretty badass. And DCVC is real cheap. if you just get a wide fritter buchner (12-14") you can handle a kg at a time.
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If you were to take 2 equal solutions, one you ran through chromatograph and one you winterized, which solution would have less waxes after a single filtration? If I understand your question correctly then I guess a dewaxing ability scale of 1 to 100, 100 being the removal of 100% of the waxes
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Yes this! I used to do chromatography simply with fritted glass filters packed with silica all the time.
I don’t know why exactly but I really like DCVC over flash chromatography. No specific scientific reason, maybe I am a vacuum pump autist or something. It just makes sense to me.
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If you run DCVC what solvent would you use? I’ve used hexane for DCVC. Using vaccum pressure instead of compressed air at the opposite end to push the solution through instead of sucking it through didn’t work because the high vaccum pressure would evaporate the hexane before it had a chance to push oil through the adsorbent layer, leaving an oil cake of celite.
I’ve got a few posts around here with my (mostly borrowed) methods. I use an alcohol and water gradient over alumina. Had excellent results with it. No issues with vacuum either. I usually run my solvent gradient cold so it has a higher % alcohol making it easier to evaporate.
One of these days I’m gonna build myself a continuous spray system for the DCVC that auto mixes the solvents I’m a gradient as it goes. But that’s an engineering problem for another day.
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I mean physical scale, like 10 kg per day etc. I see people winterize hundreds of gallons in a day but i think getting to that size with DCVC would be challenging.
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Likely. But… You could literally just make a bed as wide as you want. Setting it would be a bitch, but it’s definitely feasible. And once it’s in place you can just rinse it. I’ve used the same column 50+ times.
But… Room temperature methanol louche is so very easy to do a bunch of the legwork. I’d probably end up doing at least a partial winterizing before I’d do a DCVC anyhow. just remove an easy chunk of the bulk beforehand.
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Think it’ll work for weed stuff?
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making gradients automagically? yes.
sucrose gradients with cannabinoids?
hadn’t considered it. probably not.
Or we’d have heard about it…
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You never know lol.
From videos I saw it seems like it’s designed for protein separation?
Maybe doing it in a non-sucrose phase? I’m sure we could spin our way into some kind of success.
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I’m running only a pound of material per extraction
I don’t understand how you can mix alchohol with water. Alcohol is polar so I figured you would have to use hexane so they can separate. I ran my column with diotamatious earth packed tighter than a butthole and shaped into a perfect cylinder. Does the baked/dehydrated alumina happen to absorb all the water from your solution?
It’s not dehydrated.
You put 60% alcohol in. You get (close to) 60% alcohol out.
I don’t think it’s a traditional gradient with polar/non-polar but maybe someone who’s got more chemistry background can chime in.
I usually run from a 60% etoh up to 90% etoh. Then 96% to clean the column. That’s all with cold solvent. Would go with more water if you’re doing it at room temp.