You could try re-winterizing it, or you could run Chromatography on it, the coconut oil should be extremely non-polar and fairly easy to separate
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Disregard.
I had to deal with this last year.
I wish there was an easy solution but they have similar boiling temperatures so it made distilling impossible. We winterized with 200% ethanol, -85C freezer, tried different filters.
I did end up calling Lab Society, they do have a few ideas they floated by me, but never successfully separated it I feel.
Oh and the loss you’ll experience sucks.
DCVC over Alumina?
Not a chemist, so no clue what solvent system to suggest.
What Volume & concentration are you dealing with?
Probably worth exploring with the customer how much good money they are willing to throw down the rat hole in the attempt to compound their losses…
I’m wniterizing. 3:1 in Etoh, -55c freezer for about an hour and the shit is dropping out…sweet!
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But one is not the other…
MCT oil can actually be derived from coconuts, but it is a much more concentrated compound when compared to coconut oil . MCT oil contains 100% MCTs , whereas coconut oil only contains about 45% - 65% MCTs ( and the remainder is lesser grade lauric acid MCTs , but we’ll touch back on this later)…
Anyway I’m having good results with winterizing and washing with cold EtOh.
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Absolutely.
I was not calling you out for not searching.
Merely pointing you (and the next dozen suffering such formulation regret) at another potentially helpful thread…
I’d still wager it’s the 45-65% little buggers that are going to give you the most grief…
That was an “all call” for suggestions right?
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If coconut oil is non polar
Why not winterize in methanol ?
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Definitely an “all call” and all appreciated. Didn’t mean to come off agro…
Especially not to our fearless leader. Humble apologies!
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I would personally pour the oil onto biomass being prepared to be blasted in a closed loop BHO machine. (Must be winterized with jacketed columns) Pour it onto the end of the column closest to the collection pot and double filter all of the filters leading to the collection pot.
Blast the biomass and collect the oil from the honeypot. At this point of the process I would Theorize that the coconut oil would have solidified due to the cold winterization and the thc would be solvented from the coconut oil with the solvent butane. It wouldn’t remove 100% I would imagine but a large portion I would hope.
Then I’d take that Bho and winterize it again with butane and a cryogenic freezer until any remaining coconut oil clumps and separates.
I’d then pour off the solution through filters and repeat the process until there was no more visible separation.
purge off the butane in your vacuum over and give it a go. If you taste coconut then time to try something else. again this is just what I would try due to limited equipment and solvent availability in my lab.
Think maybe 0.05% solution of some sort of detergent like a polaxamer or tween or something as a water wash?
Last I checked MCT is completely non-miscible in methanol. Just LLE it out into MeOH.
Found this out when I ended up with a biphasic layer in my methanol rinsate jar
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DCVC with methanol over Alumina?!?
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Probably would work well if you wanted the added benefit of a very nice oil cleanup. Honestly just washing it in a sep funnel and recovering the MeOH would probably get you an oil with very little MCT in it. The downside to DCVC in my (very limited) experience (fucking around) is that like pretty much all chromatography, the solvent/solute ratio is pretty high
Edit: actually read all the responses like I should have; I’ve never tried the RP DCVC with alumina but I imagine keeping it dry dry dry would be the biggest issue because any little bit of water will destroy the adsorptive ability of the AA. Honestly a better approach might be to first LLE directly into methanol against the carrier oil, leaving the bulk of the MCT like stuff behind, followed by a louche into hep/hex. After that, dry over drying agent of choice (Epsom) and run normal phase DCVC with ethyl acetate as the polar solvent. I’d guess most of the junk not excluded by the first LLE would pass in the straight alkane fractions and thanks to @Beaker we know exactly where the THC will come out
I would recommend winterizing in methanol for sure, I always do.
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Maybe look for someone who is willing to trade straight distillate for it. Might end up being easier than trying to get it out… take a 40% loss so they have incentive to want it.
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Thank you @anon56994712!
Not my problem, but just love how powerful the hive mind can be because of how many perspectives it offers to almost any problem.
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There has to be simple LLE fix for this
This is where the hive mind will impress me
@Soxhlet any new ideas
etoh winterazation, or membrane filtration come to mind.
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