How far do you go to distill cannabinoids?

You can take that as “To what lengths do you go?” or “How far do your cannabinoids actually travel?”.

This seems like it might be both a long way to go, and a short distance to travel.

I haven’t actually looked at the path distances in any of the WFE units commonly used in our industry, and I need to wrap my head around that soon, but this looks like an interesting solution to molecular distillation.

if you explore their website, you’ll notice this thing is tiny compared to their machines targeted elsewhere, so anyone that says it’s too small needs to take another dab and go read some more.

Has anyone used or priced one of these units? Stepped up to their bigger offerings?

care to share?

WFE users; how do those residence times and path distances stack up?
(as he wanders off to try figure that out :wink:)

Edit: @Photon_noir is dubious of the above wizardry, having polled folks at lab3 and larger scale.

So lets get back to the debate of SPD vs WFE :smiling_imp:

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@DrJosh you’ve shown pictures of your WF units I believe.


image

those seem to be two different scales. want to tell us more about them?

Yeah. Myers is a great idea with absolutely atrocious execution regarding cannabis resin. Unless they have overhauled the system completely and specifically for use with cannabis resin, their units completely fail for our purposes. I was told by one of the first adopters (a well-known company in cannabis extraction) that the Myers actually ran for a grand total of 5 days (less than 12 hours each) in a 3 month period. The rest of the time, it was broken, in repair, or waiting for Myers to send parts and/or instructions. When it did run, the distillate yielded was no better than 1st pass SPD… dark red and unusually low potency of around 40 to 50% THC. Very sad, to say the least.

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Sad, I always wondered about those.

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I have studied the site for a long time.

The claim is “distillation takes place in one second”.

This is so bloody hard to word without offending the designer of the device which really is brilliant. Let me put it this way. If you walked into a bar and they had two brands of whiskey. One brand took hours of slow distillation followed by carbon filtration, then followed by seven years of storage in carbon lined barrels and cost $5 per shot. Brand two was distilled in just one second the day before and delivered fresh and cost only $2 per shot.

Which brand is likely going to be the better quality?

There are two words that nearly always seem to cause grief when used to describe this familiar process; “fast distillation”. It is like trying to make a process meant to catch a cloud into a process trying to seperate a steam blower blast. Fast seperations are chemical washes and such and not distillation as a tool for clean seperations.

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A similar basically giant rotovap called the Evapor looks to be engineered quite nicely to me. I saw some links indicating that the company also makes distillation devices, but when I contacted a US partner of theirs, they pointed me towards Myers cause they work with them too.

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That steam heated shell and rotor certinaly help, I wonder where the myers fell short?

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I travel all the way down to my labs in Sourthern Oregon to distill! :grimacing:

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You need to listen to this in the car to get pumped !

:rofl:

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thank you cyclopath. We are doing a write up now and should have it posted by Monday

Hickman, K. C. D. “High-vacuum Short-path Distillation-A Review”. Chemical Reviews. 34 (1): 51–106. doi:10.1021/cr60107a002

because the data dump tells me I don’t have upload permissions…

Edit: entering doi:10.1021/cr60107a002 into http://sci-hub.tw/ will get you the paper. Which is too large to attach here.

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This supposed to be a link?

Link to the paper @cyclopath was talking about, now in the data dump.

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And now I’m down a fucking wormhole… Thanks a lot @cyclopath

Apiezon and the first oil diffusion pump

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@Future: yeah, try and convince us you don’t enjoy it…:smile:

@CannaChemistry: is this a progenitor of the BR spinning band still?

frank1964.pdf (4.9 MB)

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@Beaker: unlike Future, you’re not travelling far to distil. The distance your cannabinoids travel is also amongst the shortest I’ve seen. Care to comment?

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Batch vs continuous flow.
Residence times and degradation or isomerization.
Price of admission.
Skill required of the operator.
Throughput.
baby sitting the &^%^&(&#@!

How many folks are putting in 12+ hrs days just because their SPD requires it?

Stop by in Eugene some time and say hello. I ma just off I5.

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How far do I go to distill?

In my sublimator runing at ¾ of one micron pressure I am running a true simple distillation. There is but one theoretical plate in my rig because there is only one evaporation and condensation (or desublimation into solid) cycle for the vast majority of compound molecules collected.

With only one evaporation cycle on average for each molecule in the compound I run now, I go exactly one theoretical plate when I distill. It is a perfect one plate simple distillation.

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Oh man that would be an honor!

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