Has anybody else heard about the water extractor from Sonic Extractor, they have units that they claim can process between 1000-50,000 lbs of hemp a day using water as a solvent. Sounds like an awesome system, in regards to the process itself, aside from the fact that the solvent is water. Has anybody heard anything about this machine?
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looks fancy
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what kind of devilry is going on here??? supercritical water???
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Precisely what went through my mind… I was like wait, did you just use supercritical and water in the same sentence?! Mind=Blown. Sounds like they haven’t sold a unit yet, the first one is still being made but for a quick 500k you can reserve it!
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woah what a rabbit hole, this is cool stuff!
ive never heard of hydrodynmaic sonochemistry before, but i think its essentialy using cavitation as a method of extraction??? or something like that idk, awesome none the less.
found this paper on hydrodynmaic sonochemistry, just started reading it, but sofar super interesting!!!
applsci-09-00766.pdf (773.8 KB)
Edit: i wonder if it would be possible to dial in the “perfect” frequency of sonication to make it such that only CBD is extracted everything else is left behind 
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I’m a mile deep down the rabbit hole now. This is some cool stuff. I now need to familiarize myself with hydrodynamic sonochemistry. Brb gonna veg out and learn all i can for the next week…
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So I’m guessing infinity supercritical aka sonic extractor is basing their design off patent 10,065,167. Cavitation based reactions with water hammer. Note that some of this will be high temp processing, so gotta watch for degradation compounds as well.
Not sure how selective it is compared to ultrasonic or conventional methods. Might end up with a waxy ball o mess. I’m grabbing popcorn to watch though.
I’ve done some algae extraction in the past via cavitation and it just does nasty (good) things to cell walls and organic material. But then again we were just trying to break open the cells.
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Dug up some more info. In one part of thir marketing materials they call it a cavitation separation (hence patent above). In another part, they claim the extraxtion is a form of centrifugal chromatography (“solvent precipitation”) using water to break through cell walls.
Heavy on ROI claims, heavy on theoreticals, real light on hard extraction data.
BUT…there is some cool stuff about how this can create uniform particle size distributions, particularly such that solubility in water goes up dramatically.
I dont see how it works without a dewax wash, but very interesting tech.
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Define light 
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It’s bursting the cell walls, letting your solvent to allow the extraction to be more efficient, from my read. There’s no selective extraction at the molecular level.
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That was my thought. Water isn’t a tuneable solvent, and the cavitation isn’t exactly a mild process
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Wonder how much sugars and chlorophyll this pulls
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I know Lilus garden talked about doing this (I suspect because the Denver Fire Dept told them they couldn’t keep that much solvent on site for the scale they were claiming they could extract at with ethanol), no idea if they actually got it off the ground or scaled up. Word on the street is they are being sued by multiple parties that gave them biomass after last falls harvest and are still waiting.
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I wouldn’t say pull…but loosen.
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I contacted them and seems they are sketchy. I have a buddy in OR that is running some Biomass in a week, If I get the results I’ll let you all know.
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Spoke with Greg today, came away with a lot of questions- the tech seems very cool but if the end product is as they describe then the amount of winterization and filtration needed to get distillable crude oil is massive.
imagine a extracting 2000-1000# per day of co2 oil and then having to winterize the crude output… seems hard to scale from a post processing standpoint but I would love to see more data and someone with a functioning system who can speak to its efficacy.
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Piquing my interest.
I employ a plethora of aggressive anti-water tactics throughout the process. lol
I can’t imagine you could ever get the selectivity of water in any state anywhere close to most currently utilized solvents, CO2 maybe, but that isn’t exactly the most user friendly system at scale anyway.
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Patent here that @Dirteagle refers to.
I know cavitation gets extremely hot on a micro level as the bubble bursts at high speed. It’s the reason ship propellers can corrode very fast if cavitation occurs.
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Same maker as infinity supercritical. I saw R&D units in summer 2018. Their workmanship is good, but their design customer support is horrible on the co2 machine. At the time we bought the co2 extractor that weren’t testing anything they made on cannabis.