Looking for a rough number on extraction vessel size where cold extraction is no longer feasible and you are forced to do warm. Whats the largest cold extraction anyone is doing here or has heard of?
Thanks
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Everything is feasible with enough money applied to it.
It would be incredibly stupid, but you could probably do cryo ethanol extractions in million gallon bucket tek style batches if you wanted.
Your budget is going to be what determines the feasibility of any given process or size of system.
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Smaller the batch the more control
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It’s all preference, budget and how much biomass you tend to process.
IMO the problem isn’t with the limits to the size of extraction vessel, but in material handling. Eventually you have to empty out all the spent biomass and if you’re doing this on a large enough scale you probably want to get every last drop of ethanol back or you’re just kissing lots of $$$ goodbye while simultaneously creating a huge fire risk, which means either a press or a centrifuge. Getting a “big enough” centrifuge or press costs cubic dollars, and using a smaller press or centrifuge and incrementally emptying your extraction vessel takes time and energy (since you probably want to keep your biomass cold before it gets fully dried, lest you pick up unwanted color, fats and waxes that have to be removed later on). Also kills your cycle time before you can load back up and do it all over again.
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^^ This.
It’s a simple process, all things considered. Doing it efficiently in a continuous process at scale is very non-trivial.
@jws66m Go look at how the pharmaceutical industry or the oil & gas industry or the biodiesel industry does things. Learn from them and how they pull off similar projects. Very very few people in the world have experience doing cannabis extractions at the kind of scale where “how big can I possibly go before the wheels fall off” is something they’ve actually run into.