500g celite 545 incoming
1lb powdered activeatide charcoal incoming as well
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It could be, ask your “buddy” what he does to achieve that result. I’ve never gotten significant color reduction with that method.
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It seems like the issue is with my DE. I wasnt able to easy obtain celite 545 so I bought some DE from a pool filtration store. After making a filter cake and letting it dry, I poured more water through to test the filter quality and it came out cloudy.
1: is this quality of DE gonna work or is it strictly celite 545 that works well?
2: do I need to just keep washing the cake til it’s no longer cloudy?
3: is the cake supposed to be rock hard when it’s ready to go? When I’m pouring more water in , after it’s dried out initially, it displaces the surface DE to the point where I feel like I could pour a hole straight to the glass frit
We had a period a couple of years ago where we ran out of a box of swimming pool DE I had used successfully for years. Lost the box-top, so no idea where to get more (!). Tried other pool filter aids as well as “food grade” DE without success: “fines” would creep past papers (several different grades), and either produce cloudy filtrates, or worse, precipitates later in processing. Finally procured Celite 545, which eliminated our copious residual grief!
The 545 product is made with stricter controls on particle size, to do exactly what we need. It can cleanly remove lab grade carbon, like the Norit/Darco products used in organic chemistry labs. Highly recommended!
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Your cake isn’t compacted, it shouldn’t move when poured onto. How big is your funnel? My filter cakes feel like drywall gypsum. Also wash the cake with the solvent you plan on useing.
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It’s an 80mm diameter 465ml medium frit. I’ve been preparing the DE by mixing water (3/4 filling the funnel) then having a vac pulled on it for 2 hours til it dries out. My cake is usually 1/2inch thick but once it dries out it seems like it’s mildly more compacted than without the “prep” and simply tapping the top with my finger makes an indent and displaces the surface powder
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Is it possible that this type of DE just isn’t able to be used for this application? Not sure what else to do to get it into a compacted cake
It could be the water causing it to swell? Try pulling a vac adding the powder and taping and compacting with a stopper or some other flat object. Get it to a hard packed consistency taking care to get the edges well compacted. Add a bit of the solvent you are using to test the cake. It should remain hard and compact. It doesn’t take me more than 10 min to set up to filter with celite. If your filtration slows you can use a scoopula to gentaly scrape the top .5mm of DE off the surface.
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So to prepare the cake am I just compacting the dry powder or am I adding solvent to the powder and then compacting that and letting it dry?
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I just watched a you tube video of celite 545 and then a carbon scrub on a etoh thc extract. I tried to find the vid again, but can’t seem to get my eyes to focus with this migraine.
In that DCVC it appears he has layers of silica and sand underneath the dry celite
He uses the Celite as a way to dry load the column.
You should be able to do the same thing he did with water with your solvent. That’s how I go about that. You can filter almost immediately. I’ve never had to leave a funnel for 2 hours or overnight, that’s silly! Both dry and wet load make good results. You just wouldn’t want to try that with a non- fitted buchner!
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The compaction seems to have done the trick, thank you! Now I’m going to try a longer period of ac scrubbing with heat and better agitation than previously attempted. Does silica by itself remove color? Or is it absolutely necessary to get the clay
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Both work, in slightly different ways.
Which would work better for removal of the amber color specifically?
Use both, but use the silica as your filter aid.
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My observations suggest that the red color is cbn. The most stable cannabinoid (correct me if I am wrong) it has a chemical structure suitable for “resonance” or “conjugation” or just movement of electrons. This resonance makes the molecule more stable and gives it an ability to emit light in the visible spectrum giving it a red hue.
That is an interesting observation that when you get much of the red color out there seems to be red color form faster. My educated guess is something vastly reported in biochemistry as flux or LeChatlier’s principle. In short, these cannabinoid molecules exist in equilibrium therefore if you picture thc/cbd on the left of a chemical conversion arrow and cbn on the right. As you remove cbn from the right the equilibrium wants to shift to make more cbn. This is favorable (the chemistry wants to occur) because of cbn’s stability vs thc/cbd. Heat and UV light really speed this process up unfortunately not in a controlled manner.
Feel free to message if you want more details/phone convo etc
@Steviewonder @Soxhlet
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