Can anyone recommend an in-line filter I can install after the butane tank that will effectively filter out ‘mystery oil’ from the butane?
My thoughts are that distilling the butane to get this gunk out is extra time and there should be a way to filter it before it ever touches the closed loop solvent tank. Shouldn’t something similar to a filter that catches water on an air compressor before the air line do a decent enough job doing this?
Graci
Nope the water catchers. Are molecular sieves of wich we know the molecules size and can there for catch it
Mystery oil is a unknown compound(s)
That we have no cleu How to catch in line a membrane might get it done but the price is daunting
What this guy says. Just get good solvent to begin with. Stop can tapping power 5 and you’ll be good.
Distill it. Even with good solvent…
You would probably need a molecular size exlcusion membrane rather than just a simple adsorbent media. The reason being that the mystery oils and the alkanes they are dissolved in are too similar to one another to be removed by simple adsorption, anything that has an affinity to adsorb the mystery oil will have an affinity for the alkanes as well so very little if any separation will occur with an isocratic solvent system.
Can try a wax trap.
Distilling the solvent is currently the only way to remove them.
Sadly mistery oil has shown up in large tanks as well so guess always distill is the best
Thanks for the replies. The mystery oil is a liquid, is it not? Is not mystery oil just tank lubricant?
And if it is a liquid, could this not be separated from the gaseous butane with the same type of technology that is designed to separate liquid water from gaseous air, regardless of particle size of the oil component?
Hmm… this is interesting, I’d love to know more
to get gas butane you need to boil it
This would work if the lubricant didnt stay in solution. But it does. It will not ever settle like water will outbof compressed air.
We are dealing with a liquid not a gas. Gasses have much less capacity to dissolve than a liquid. This is why the water settles in the bottom of the tank and is able to be drained that way.
Maybe on your injection side rather than vapor side. You can always add a manifold and a smaller seperate collection pot and be distilling and adding while running
Every form of butane you will ever encounter needs Distillation. Guaranteed.
Even from @SolventDirect
They’re supposedly doing something no other solvent manufacturer is. Doing a cleaning on all gas and solvent tanks before every sale.
I’ve been using best value vacs gas… never again
I’m going with @SolventDirect next time. @BG305 has been passing testing using their solvent and not distilling it before use.
Speaking from personal experience, I’ve never seen ANY butane from any supplier (I’ve used dozens over the last decade) that didn’t require distillation. When I was working hydrocarbon labs we would distill at 60-70F slow as hell. The stuff that we consitently cleaned out of the collection pot post distillation was absolutely horrifying. Blacks, blues, reds, greens but ALWAYS some amount of “mystery oil”. Better gas would mean far less mystery oil, but there was always something. Every single time. Canned crap and Eco Green still rank among the worst. Double Distillations necessary at a minimum with that cheap bastard gas lol.
I’ve actually had the pleasure to work directly with the higher ups at Air Gas. They flew a VP over from France to try and tackle this problem. Had some samples sent to their lab in Texas for chromatography but never heard back. I’ll send some follow up emails, kinda lost interest after I shifted to ethanol lol. Oh and they are supposedly going to be opening up a cannabis wing for hydrocarbons. Stainless steel tanks, pre distilled…We’ll see. Exciting stuff.
@fuckCBD I thought at one point, maybe the butane could hit stainless perforated disks in a series like this and the mystery oils could trap to the stainless.
But we all work with filtered butane. So ideally filtering is not the issue. Distilling is ideal because using a stainless tank you can keep going in circles distilling between the base and the tank until the solvent is clean of lubes. It takes like a half hour at most and that’s if you’re using a lot of solvent.
Just take the time.
