@cyclopath The enzymatic syntheses are believed to occur in the disc cells at the base of each balloon. They are aqueous inside. The cannabinoids and essential oil compounds created then migrate through the cell wall into the envelope between the wall and the outer membrane (balloon). Or this is the prevailing theory, I believe.
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So we got our x13 beads. Just did a distillation run and the vapor coming out of the mole sieve going to my heat exchanger was hotter then it ever has been. Our hot water is only 95f but the vapor coming out got so hot that I could not touch the top of the heat exchanger. This was fresh solvent so there should not have been that much moisture to get the beads that hot. Could this be the impurity causing the beads to warm up so much? This only happened on the first half of recovery. After that temps went down to less then body temp as it felt slightly cool to the touch. there was possible a little bit of n2 in there as I cleaned out a previous run from a column and pushed some solvent over. Would n2 cause x13 to get crazy hot or was it something else? Are the beads no good after they get that hot?
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I did note my 13x get hot af as well. Hope they work to prevent the problem for you!
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I have not noticed this before. I am going to investigate now
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Heat is generated due to adsorption, what probably happened is you just adsorbed a lot of solvent into the beads.
The pores on 13x Mol sieve are definitely large enough to fit alkanes and alkenes.
You dint normally see this amount of heat being generated with normal 3a Mol sieve because there’s never actually alot of water being adsorbed onto its surface when you’re trying to dry your solvent. If you put some beads in a small beaker and poured water into it, the water will get like 160F+ very quickly because adsorption is exothermic.
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Franklins right. Fresh 13x beads are going to grab everything that will fit on them, and the grabbing process generates heat. As the bead surface moves toward saturation, it grabs less and eventually is clogged and removes nothing.
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Which would saturate the beads preferentially , alkanes vs water?
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Probably dependant on pressure. I think 13x is typically used for pressure swing adsorption where you get shit to adsorb and desorb preferentially based in the pressure in the column.
so are they clogged after only passing 100lbs of solvent through them? Is the solvent that dirty or are the beads adsorbing butane? If so why are people using them? Cause about half way through they stopped generating any heat. The following run they generated heat for the first half again.
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I’d figure the water is too small to get all caught-up in the 13x. No doubt some would bet grabbed, but I think most would bounce around and keep right on going.
IT’s likely that the solvent captured on the beads vaporized when given the opportunity, opening the avenue for more adsorption for the next run.
would it ever be possible for the heat generated to exceed the flashpoint of solvents?
Yes its super scary I discussed this in the alumina thread I ran pentane through a glass column. Lack of oxygen in a Closed Loop though
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You mean autoignition temperature? That’s 405c for butane so we would be good. I called and spoke with the absorbents company and they said 13x would be a good application for what I described to him.
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Are you sure about that? Delta Absorbents’ description kind of suggests it grabs everything from 3 angstroms until 10 Angstroms.
Interestingly, they also claim it can remediate hydrogen sulfide and mercaptans
Mine just arrived today. At best, I’ll test it out this weekend, not that I’ll be seeing a different result (since I haven’t experienced challk diamonds .
I can verify that out of the bag, it heats up significantly in contact with water. (And I wonder if it does the same upon absorption of other contaminants) I regularly tested my 4A beads by dripping water on them, and seeing if they heated up.
13x having 10a pores will be able to adsorb any molecule that’s 10a or less in size. 13x adsorbs water just as well as 3a, the difference is that the pores allow for larger molecules to be adsorbed, not just water.
The pressure that the beads are exposed to is what mediates the preferential adsorption. From what I’ve read the beads are desorbed in a batch style process by exposing them to pressurized nitrogen atmosphere where the nitrogen displaces the hydrocarbons and can be separated by condensation.
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Not completely sure. We’ve used the 13x as a desiccant in vapor phase purification it adsorbs moisture well, but once the channels on the media get jammed with larger molecules, the smallers will not have places to adhere and keep on moving.
13x removes CO2 and H2O from 99.99% pure gases, but if there are other molecules present, you can’t predict it’s effectiveness.
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Definitely a couple things happening here, So I have now attempted and successfully made “medusa stones” that stay stable and don’t sugar out and Ive given a sample to @Photon_noir to preform the Crystallography report, it started of with only one or two per batch staying stable but after playing with some variables and dialing in the parameters we’ve had an entire tray thats stabilized, so that being said I’m now pretty confident I know what is causing the polmorphs to change, but thats not causing the chalking issue alone
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