Looking to see how people recover lost yield from adsorbents. We use a variety of media (T5/AC/B80/silica 60 etc) in a variety of solvents (every alcohol, every hydrocarbon, CO2, and a bunch of other stuff lol). One issue we run into is that we inevitably have Cannabinoids that don’t elute from the media, especially during later steps where we don’t want any of the junk that adsorbed to co-elute.
Now, washing the shit out of it with fresh solvent obviously works but I’m trying to avoid increasing the load on our solvent recovery capacity. I was wondering if anyone came up with a clever way to do this on an ongoing basis. I was thinking about maybe loading up a big soxhlet and refluxing the crap out of it, seems like it would be pretty passive. Thoughts?
A soxhlet will probably recover some lost desirables, but the process would be lengthy.
The recovered material would probably not be worth the effort, unless you are going to process massive amounts of filter media.
The whole process of filtering relies on the clinginess of the filter media, for the undesirable compounds. That clinginess will try to retain the adsorbed particles, making it difficult to wash off whatever is attached.
Repeated washes, with clean solvent, will recover some stuff, but what you get out will be dirty.
Using a soxhlet, with ETOH, would be the least effort. When the soxhlet system is placed under a vacuum, it will cycle at very close to room temperature. Look up ORCExtractor, on these forums, to see a large SS soxhlet.
Warm ethanol scrub.
Run through a vac filter.
Remove solvent and distill.
Obviously adds to your solvent recovery but you can get a yield and figure out if it’s worth chasing.
I use just enough etho to cover my silica to minimize solvent.
This is exactly the system I was thinking of! I must have read it a while ago and had a picture of it in my head but couldn’t place it.
We really don’t use that much media (maybe a kg/week) but it does eat up a good couple percentage points and in the state where we operate, those points are expensive.
The bentonite doesn’t seem tough to pull the stuff out with alcohol (silica obviously even less). But that freaking AC, I swear it just don’t wanna let go.
As far as the reclaim being dirty, that’s a given. Running high pressure CO2, we’re getting pretty good at cleaning up dirty nasty crude. If I can take the last little bit of junk from the end and move it back to the beginning at bulk processing, that’s a win in my book.