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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I should say though, that you’re liable to extract all sorts of impurities in the process. Saponified fats… degradation and hydrolysis of the starches… Perhaps even mixed isomerizations and reactions of deprotonated phenol on cbd with functional groups of other molecules. I’d look towards several stages of cleanup before we even get to RO.
Agree it s deffenatly inferior to solvent extractions but might be feasable for those that are not allowed to use solvents
Keeping the noids dissolved in water is not an easy chalabge
