Is it possible to Decarboxylate in Delta’s FFE45? What changes do we have to make to the system, to decarb? What do you guys think?
I used to run a CES sprayvap and I was able to use it to do a partial decarb on the material every night at the end of the run.
When your collection is chocked full of low etOH solution start increasing vac and temp, you’ll need to be kind of slow going with it b.c. u don’t want it to react to quickly and bump
I did this pretty much every run and my decarbs from then on only took about 30 mins in the hot plate to complete instead of 2 hours.
The sprayvap was all glass lending itself to this process well, not sure if stainless would be as easy to see what’s going on
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how long, and what temp do you currently decarb?
how to you propose matching those conditions in the FFE?
do you really think you want finished crude in those tiny tubes?
you don’t actually have to remove all the solvent to decarb despite @Kingofthekush420’s protestations to the contrary…but it does take a while even when evaporating at atmospheric pressure. see: Decarbing during solvent removal. @eyeworm has repeatedly stated that solvents like ethanol actually potentiate the reaction (Ethanol crystals - #48 by eyeworm).
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…
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I jumped in on that one too early I agree 100% with @cyclopath
How I used my sprayvap wouldn’t really apply here sorry about that.
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you were using the secondary evaporator(s)?
those to seem pretty small.
trusteel’s FFE has a secondary evaporator that would make a decent decarb unit imo.
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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
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yes, but the decarb speed will be dependent on the temperature you can set the evaporator to.
you may need to not run at vacuum and dose in with a pump to be successful.
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Just decarb by pushing your oil through an activated alumina column before you recover.
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Do what now?
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Decarb by pushing your oil through a column of activated alumina
Dissolve undecsrbed oil in an alcohol and send it through
The column will start to give off steam and it’ll hiss
It’s describing over the column of catalyst
You can get a full decarb and remove a ton of pigment and water soluble stuff
Your cannabinoids will come off in varying fractions as well
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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.
Any ideas on mechanism?
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Or proof showing it works
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I just keep imagining a spool filled with dirt give off “steam, and spitting” from some weeded out alcohol…
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It’s almost like they’re the same person, or something 
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and does said reaction also occur in hydrocarbons too?
'cause I seem to remember someone mentioning their CRC getting really hot…
in @Waxplug1’s case it was probably the carbon
@Apothecary36 mentioned Alumina, but added water…
and then there’s this…
edit: CBD goes both ways?
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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?
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I found a couple papers that talk about decarboxylation of fatty acids and other hydrocarbons that have carboxylic acid moieties
Decarboxylation of Fatty Acids with Pd Catalyst with Alumina, Silica or Carbon Base
Decarboxylation of Petroleum Acids with Alumina
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.”
And these figures are awesome:
Looks like decarboxylation using Activated Alumina is definitely possible, although both these papers investiage much higher temperatures than we typically deal with.
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Basically, it can be done, but offers no real advantage over the process of heat with time… Thanks for papers, I’m gonna check them out!
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.
Maybe a combo with both would work!
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