What size are your sieves, if they are 3A, that is what you use to dry ethanol, 4A/5A is good for ethanol and hydrogen sulfide, but a lot of terpenes are way to big to fit unless you are using a 10A sieve.
What temperature is that at btw? If its LN2 cold they could be solid, doubtful though.
It may just be stuff that was adsorbed to the surface. When you regenerate molecular sieves after drying solvent, you always purge the solvent so you don’t light anything on fire when you start heating. So it could just be what your concentrate would be and that’s why it smells so good.
Ok, so those are 10A, which is big enough for pulling THF (tetrahydrofuran), but not that I think about it, a lot of terpenes are still way to big to do that. The smallest one I can think of is isoprene and I’m pretty sure 10As don’t pull butane (isoprene is about the same size). Also, was the solid residue there immediately after opening? Because if you didn’t heat it then its probably just adsorbed to the surface.
It was the next day when I went to swap beads I opened and it was like that on one side of the 1um mesh screen but not the flip side, it was clean on the other side.
13X 4X8 Molecular Sieve Desiccant is a multiple purpose, highly porous, high capacity alkali metal alumino- silicate in the spherical form. It is the sodium form of the Type X crystal structure with pore diameters of approximately 10A°. It can adsorb all molecules that can be adsorbed by 3A, 4A, and 5A molecular sieve. Type 13X can also adsorb molecules such as aromatics and branched-chain hydrocarbons, which have large critical diameters.
I did forget how big THF is, so you can get some slightly larger molecules in there, but that means butane can partially diffuse into the sieve no? Not sure how long butane is, but propane definitely if you run blends. So you may just be going too big with your sieve. If you’re strictly just drying, use 4A or 3A, both work, 3 is better to prevent unwanted or unplanned compounds coming through.
Now that I think about it, it’s probably just dive dust. They aren’t super delicate, but they will shed dust with agitation. I wayyyy over thought that
You ever get a carryover that goes from clear liquid solvent to puffy white foam then back to clear liquid? Before adding 10 angstrom desiccant, I was getting a lot of that passing by my 3 angstrom molecular sieve. Always assumed it was a hydrosol but now you have me wondering if it was a less polar terpene.
I’ve definitely gotten build up before. Only times I’ve gotten a clear liquid in any vacuum lines is on my ovens. If I was driving more solvent, I would probably have more of an issue. The 13x has the same angstrom as 10a. I am going to try a couple runs with flushing it through a column of the 13x, then through another one for vapor. Then change out the sieve each day and start with a new one in the morning.
and we still run them after the expansion chamber 