@GroovyOctopusLabs@Renchi This is where you might as well have put the material into a hydrocarbon, anyway… either on initial extraction or by LLE from ethanol diluted with water.
If you properly comminuted the biomass without sharp blades, and extracted with ethanol kept below -67°C at reasonably brief residence time, and finally filtered effectively, you will not pick up any significant amount of undesirable material, like chlorophyll, phospholipids or phosphatides for which you would need to decolor, pH adjust or degum.
Bentonite is a generic term for a certain aluminosilicate clay structure, which can have any number of acids, bases, cations, or intercalated waters of hydration in it. Generally, bentonite is hydrophilic and has sodium and/or calcium cations floating in its intercalated water. Calcination, or “firing” the clay at various high temperatures, with or without air, will change its properties, especially with regard to non-polar solutions of cannabis resin. Not so much with ethanol, although it does need to be calcined for any work with ethanol, since you don’t want extra water in the alcohol. The more anaerobic and hot the calcination, the better the results for decoloring, and the less likely it will change the pH.
However, dried opaline (hydrated amorphous) silica is the most preferable decoloring agent for cannabis resin I have ever found. Search those terms here for more information I recently released on this material.
Thank you again. As usual you help further the necessary knowledge of understanding the fundamentals in our field. This is much appreciated information and I shall look into this further.
Ever consider selling sea urchins as a novelty product? Those are gorgeous! Nicely done! The lattice in the first picture definitely looks like CBD, but I haven’t ever seen crystals like that bottom picture.
We distribute hardwood carbon that is similar to A, and a steamed prewashed carbon that is similar to B. Soak your carbon in water, drain the water, test water pH…thats gonna be the best way to know. Most carbons have wide pKa ranges so reported pH will say like 4-8, basically useless info. Steamed carbons seem to be the most neutral in my experience. We also distribute an alkaline carbon that you could mix with another carbon to have a better shot at neutral conditions.
Not sure I wasn’t there. But I was told from my colleagues that the tech demonstrating from hydrion scientific broke it during the demonstration. They said there may have been too much butane left in the crude? Never found out the real cause of destruction but they never fixed it. I stopped working for that company a few months ago
Updates on some other side projects and random shit from regular production.
Again, only working with high THC feedstock.
Changed up some collection parameters for the CXE portion of our extraction in order to minimize passover from our heavy liquid/sesquiterpene fraction, and have seen crystal formation post rotovap on a number of occasions, testing is looking like we’re seeing marginally higher cannabinoid content by mass percent, and I’m attributing the more frequent appearance of crystalline structure post evap to that.
Also running a couple experiments based on my observation that the structural differences I’m seeing between jars have a lot to do with remaining solvent %. Higher solvent % seems to cause longer spikes, whereas a lower % seems to give me the tighter structure that seems to be pretty ubiquitously referred to here as urchins. I have noticed that if I grow a jar of urchins and then drain the supernatant from the mass, I will see spiky structures that are similar to what I see in higher solvent % jars form on top of the denser urchin mass below.
Also working on crystallization in our separated terpene fraction, I’ll update if anything comes from that little jar.
Attaching a bunch of pics, lmk if anyone has any questions.
