Good Day All!!
Im an extractor and distiller out of Las Vegas. I am here to see if anyone can be of assistance for some bottlenecks I am encountering.
I run a 5l Summit short path. Old Version. Not full bore. Old GL connections. O
I run the 3 stage winterization, Hot carbon Scrub, Silica bed filter, rotovape, first pass with a little carbon in the flask. . Then Use Enzymtic degumming, heptane dilution, Liquid sep funnel with distilled water, brine,citric acid, and sodium bicarbonate ph buffers. Then cbleach scrub, magsil columns, cbeads columns, roto out heptane, then proceed to second pass.
I am having issues with:
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Time frame. It is taking me 10 days to accomplish it all. The biggest bottle neck is heptane addition and removal. Does the @carbonchemistry Degumming clay work well enough to bypass heptane? If I could skip the heptane addition and roto for the 2nd time, I could move much faster. Wondering if anyone has feedback on this. I would love to do my initial hot carbon scrub with the DGC to save all that time.
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Red oxidation. Disty seems highly reactive with air even the next day after 2nd pass. the appearance degrades rapidly. Wondering if anyone has issues remediating this.
Thank you all. I appreciate your time.
What solvent/temp is your initial extraction? With warm ethanol extract I have been winterizing in methanol after spiking with citric acid, then tossing into a sep funnel with heptane and water, adding baking soda, rinsing to neutral, then filtering the heptane solution over activated alumina, carbon, silica, and B80 clay. I then recover the heptane and decarb/devol before distilling. My CBD distillate comes out gold and does not turn red. I only do a single pass. I found that doing the filtration in heptane works WAY better than filtering in ethanol. The AA and silica seems to pull a BUNCH of the browns/reds.
What part of the heptane addition/removal is taking so long? I use a 4:1 heptane to extract ratio and because heptane recovers so quickly, I’m able to recover it in a 5L roto in about half an hour. My LLE only takes about 3 hours.
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Thank you for your time and input!!
For my initial extraction, I use Butane. I use a condensing coil and super chill the butane to around -80c when it hits the material column.
Its not the addition or removal. Its the The Crashing of gums is what takes the longest. I Can add it within 30 min. and roto it out in an hour. Its the adding distilled water, shaking, waiting drain. Then add brine solution, shake, wait, drain, then citric acid water, shake, wait, drain, Then baking soda add shake wait, drain. Am I being redundant? are all ph phases of water not essential to clean out all gums?
How long does it take you to go from crude to disty?
Thank you again
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Full disclosure, I usually only do about a liter of crude at a time, but it takes me about 3 days from crude to distillate after I finally dialed it all in. 6 hours from filtering off fats in winterization to finishing my LLE and draining off the heptane solution. It could probably be scaled up and take the same amount of time or shorter with the right equipment though, which I’m going to have to figure out very soon myself.
Afa the rinses go, I figured the majority of my gums were coming out in my winterization and being left behind on the alumina and the rest coming out with the methanol/water mix. I simply threw the acidic methanol solution in with 4 liters of heptane, diluted the methanol to ~50% with water (not brine), drained, mixed about a teaspoon of baking soda with brine water, drained, then did two rinses with brine water and that’s it. I will say that acidic brine rinses formed an emulsion that took FOREVER to break, which is why I would immediately raise the Ph after I took off the methanol/water layer. Also, be gentle when you mix up the neutral rinse water. As long as you don’t use too much baking soda, two rinses should be enough to get the Ph back to neutral. That’s where I was screwing up with my initial experiments was I was adding WAY too much baking soda and mixing way too hard. It was taking me up to 5 neutral rinses and 2-3 days just waiting on emulsions to clear. I am using a 10 gallon sep funnel.
This is my first pass disty next to the tails. I made it for a customer who paid to get his biomass extracted and told me he’d share the test results with me when he got them back, but that hasn’t happened yet so I’m not sure what the purity is. It did however start crystallizing up within 24 hours.
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I degum in my methanol prior to winterization, this allows me to skip having to winterize again and avoid heptane.
I use carbon chems degumming enzymes, they work great
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Get a ptfe mixing paddle or a two way inlet so you can vac in water and it will do alot of mixing for you. Thats how i do it m, then hit it tor 15 seconds with the paddle never have to take funnel off mount.
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