no, it’s not the pressure that matters, it’s the temp, but if you’re evaporating ethanol, the pressure defines the evaporation temp. your delta FFE runs at vacuum, and while vacuum is great for decarbing (allows devol at the same time), it lowers your evaporation temp…so in this case its working against you. unless you’ve removed all your solvent first.
assuming full solvent removal first: the secondary evaporator in the delta FFE doesn’t look like it’s meant to hold much in the way of crude, so using that as a batch style decarb reactor doesn’t make a lot of sense, which leaves you recirculating crude in the machine for ??? with the heat turned up. might work. might make a huge mess. especially if you’ve got sugars in your crude.
adding a catalyst to the tincture before hitting go on the other hand…
The collection vessel on them is definitely small.
After filling it up as high as I could with out flooding the column I would slowly increase the jacket temp, vacuum, and stir speed.
For me it was worth it to recover as much ethanol as possible in the system and go as far into decarb as I had time for. This was good for me b.c. I didn’t have any hint of ventilation in the lab at the time and I also had a lot of free time to dick around and see what else the sprayvap was capable of.
It was very low throughput running like this as I was only able to recover a kg or so of mostly decarbed and purged material every few hours 5 or 6 maybe?
You have to stop the feed completely to do what I was was doing so it’s deff not super productive
I have never heard of this before, certainly if it’s a catalytic conversion from acid form to activated form, then a reaction must be occurring which is allowing for the liberation of the CO2.
Thanks for linking that thread @cyclopath! It was a good read. SO how about the thought of using granular carbon to remove the mercaptans in some of the canned butane? Maybe keep the spool with the carbon in a cooler with dry ice to counteract the exothermic reaction?
The second paper provides a lot of good information, for instance: “The research results indicated that the solid
acid catalyst was highly effective for catalytic decarboxylation
of petroleum acids from crude oils with an acid removal rate
of higher than 97% in a fixed fluidized bed reactor. More
attracting was that the solid acid catalysts had a feature of
bifunctionality, i.e. a combination of catalytic decarboxylation
and catalytic cracking reaction. It is an especially promising
practical method to process high acid crude oils.”
Looks like decarboxylation using Activated Alumina is definitely possible, although both these papers investiage much higher temperatures than we typically deal with.
I’d say that the advantage is specifically that it removes the heat requirement for decarboxylation–so at larger scale it might be attractive (if its easy to regenerate the catalyst) because of the cost reduction from electricity and investment in heaters/boilers.
If you’re using Delta’s FFE45, are you using a keg to collect the post-FFE miscella?
If you are, then you are probably aware how brutally hot those kegs get. And because ethanol, a solvent with a high heat capacity, is what’s causing it to heat up, it will stay hot for a while. It’s possible that some decarboxylation happens inside the FFE itself, but the residence time of THCA in those tubes is very small. The majority of the decarboxylation occurs in the keg, after the fact.
So, if you hold the extract in there, and keep that keg hot, yeah you could probably get full decarboxylation before all of your ethanol evaporates.