Has anyone dealt with “LAB ALLEY”?
They are located in TX
Looking for a new supplier for 55gal of n-pentane and EtOH denatured with hex
Mahalo
hexane? Not Heptane?
CDA-12 is the formulation folks not using straight 190 usually go for. I’m currently using it, and dubious. getting it dry upon recovery seems problematic.
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That’s funny you ask about the EtOH mix with hexane. Our supplier just got the permitting to blend this recipe and is supposedly one of the few in the country permitted to do so. We can ship it to you but you’ll need to purchase multiple barrels or totes to make it worth your while as the shipping cost will be quite high.
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I got some
The problem with hexane is the parts per mil are like 300 and hept is 5000
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Dry? What do you mean?
No is has water…
Which the ethanol will presumably pick up from the cannabis…
I’m not saying it doesn’t work, just that I understand getting my liquor back to my starting point, and I haven’t figured this stuff out…
…and when I ask the wizard he says things like “ternary azeotrope”…which only make me more certain that I don’t know how to get it back where I started from.
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To 190 or 200?
Distillation isn’t the way to break azeotropic bonds
Use molecular sieves to absorb the water: they can be reused after baking out the h20
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Don’t need to break any azeotropes to reuse 190…
One could presumably use them to try and return CDA12 to CDA12, but I’ve got no way of measuring success…do you?!?
Adding an entrainer also an option…
I posted about the idea of using pentane to grab non polars and add water to EtOH to break solubility
I want to strip my solvent and reuse it.
I want to know it is the same every time
With 190 I r grok. With CDA12 I do not.
Adding pentane does not sound like a rational solution. Not adding heptane does.
I would love to learn.
Tell me how I’m wrong.
Please? 
You’re not going to break the heptane EtOH bond to get 200 proof just Iike EtOH and water distilled will get 190
Also, depending on what you want to remove and isolate out : ie cannabinoids, terps (polar and non polar et al)
So check out that info on breaking azeotropes and then just think about what’s polar / nonpolar and
CDA12 does not seem like a drop in replacement for 190 unless it can be returned trivially to its starting point.
We are agree that distilling whatever proof ethanol/water mix I have will get me back to my starting point?
190proof. Which is where I want to be. Easy peasy, go to the azeotrope and you’re done. Almost impossible to get wrong.
My question is how do I return to my starting point when using CDA12?
It seems like considerably more work, and it’s not clear how I determine the end point even after I’ve figured out how to get there.
Adding more stuff (pentane?) to make that happen is certainly a formal solution, but I’ve got minions to train and each additional step leaves another opening for production errors
Let start with: How I can confirm that I’ve returned to 200proof ethanol w/5% heptane?
Or maybe even, how much heptane is in your CDA12? I’ve heard up to 15% on occasion…I guess I could throw a sim-dist column in my GC…but again, not a problem I’ve run into with ethanol at azeotrope.
Hexane forms an azeotropes with ethanol and acetone.
Heptane forms an azeotropes with water and methanol.
They both form other azeotropes with stuff less likely to be in your lab.
Clearly what I deserve for my efforts to dissuade spoon feeding…
Still looking for a way to understand my recovered CDA12
Can’t throw cash, will share stash 
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Ok, so, I’m not the biggest fan of ethanol. I have never used the blends above, so I first wanted to see what denaturant formulas are allowed in the USA.
The FDA didn’t help; these seemed the closest (per 100 gallons):
- 5 gallons of methyl alcohol.
- 10 gallons of ethyl ether.
*. 100 gallons of ethyl ether. - 8 gallons of acetone, U.S.P.
- 8 gallons of acetone, U.S.P., and 1.5 gallon of methyl isobutyl ketone.|
- 10 gallons of methyl alcohol.|
- 5 gallons of ethyl ether.|
- 25 gallons of ethyl acetate having an ester content of 100% by weight or the equivalent thereof not to exceed 5 gallons of ethyl acetate with an ester content of not less than 85% by weight.|
- 3 gallons of ammonia, aqueous, 27 to 30% by weight; 3 gallons of strong ammonium solution, N.F.; 17.5 pounds of caustic soda, liquid grade, containing 50% by weight sodium hydroxide; or 12 pounds of caustic soda, containing 73% by weight sodium hydroxide.|
Sorry for the copypasta…
So when I google CDA-12 I find a little more.
CDA 12-A §21.26 Formula No. 12-A
(a) Formula. To every 100 gallons of alcohol add: Five gallons of n-heptane, or 5 gallons of toluene.
CDA-19 § 21.33 Formula No. 19
To every 100 gallons of ethyl alcohol of not less than 160 proof add: 4.0 gallons of either methyl isobutyl ketone, mixed isomers of nitro propane, or methyln- butyl ketone; and1.0 gallon of either kerosene, deodorized kerosene, gasoline, unleaded gasoline, rubber hydrocarbon solvent, or heptane.
CDA-20 § 21.24 Formula No. 20
(a) Formula. To every 100 gallons of ethyl alcohol of not less than 195 proof add: A total of 2.0 gallons of either unleaded gasoline, rubber hydrocarbon solvent, kerosene, or deodorized kerosene; or any combination of these.
So CDA-12 is either 5% n-heptane or 5% toluene.
Heptane does not form an azeotrope with ethanol, but does with water. It boils at 92C, so it would always be the tails of you distilled CDA-12 containing it. Should your CDA-12 contain toluene it would be harder to remove. Since it gets complete with a water-ethanol azeotropes and a water-heptane or water-toluene azeotrope I’d be careful if I wanted to use it many times, and hope I got heptane and could distill it to purity, if it was the only option.
Better sourcing may be in order … some of the FDA approved blends seem less headachey, but it’s possible I’m ignorant and that product is optimized for this process off label.
Edit:
Acetone or methanol look cleaner to me as denaturants bc the only azeotrope would be alcohol-water.
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CDA 12 — are you adding water to have a 190 proof starting material or just absorbing water from biomass??
190 proof seems to be best.
I don’t know what your sop or equipment or methods are…
Extract, reclaim then use molecular sieves to absorb h20.
Test solution.
Run solution through rotovap / reclaim again
Test solution
That should give you enough info to move forward.
Do bench top scale and scale up from results
Have you had any samples tested to know what condition your solvent is at after several runs?