Hi, I have the opportunity to make some research with a SFE co2 machine.
I am actually extracting at 350bar, 50°C during about 1h.
This publication
suggest to extract at 40°, 330 bar during 2h with 2% cosolvent etoh,
Would you have any other ideas or publications suggesting other ways or parameters to extract ?
My goal: extract the most amount of cannabinoids, the less amount of fats to not loose my life in winterization = all of this as quick as I can X)
Thanks for your help!!
Don’t do cosolvent without a C1D1/2 setup. Supercritical ethanol would be a bad thing to leak.
For typical THC runs you just need a solvent density of about 800 kg/m^3. If you’re going for THCA (a little less efficient) you’ll want to back down to subcritical.
Looks like you’re running ~899 kg/m^3 already so you should be good t go for a THC run.
Hi, thanks for your help. I use etoh + co2 to clean the vessel and the piping. Usually the autoclave is above 200 and the first separator at 90bar.
Im aiming actually more the cbd than the thc, are the parameters the same for both cannabinoids ?
With my actual settings, I have 800/900kg m3. Is there any literature that could help me to improve the method ?
Thanks for your help
only see one paper under CO2 in the Data Dump! (Scientific Papers) we can do better.
you sound like you might already grok https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=SFE+CO2
chances are there is useful information behind Search results for 'CO2' - Future4200 but you’re gonna have to dig a little. eg Beyond CO2 density, "vapor pressure" method boosts THCa throughput
@ExTek90 had a method of true fractional extraction where he would run a light fraction first pulling off terpenes. Following this would be a quick heavy fraction run pulling off waxes, and finally the last heavy fraction would pull the remaining acidic cannabinoids. Although, if you read further and continue his procedure, the ultimate goal was to produce crystallized THCa, I do not see how this would not work for what you are trying to do.
Your calculated densities seem sound, although, I don’t know if there is any info out there that would elicit parameters geared towards fractionating CBD off from the rest of the THC and other cannabinoids. Might be out of the hands of CO2 extraction and more applicable for fractional distillation or chromatography.
CBD should be roughly the same. I have zero experience with CBDA if you’re going for that though.
Thank you all for those answers. I have now plenty of stuff to read and try. I will try to come back with some personal conclusiones from my own trials in a bit in this post. Cheers
CBD is a little less soluble than THC in CO2, but not by much. Good luck optimizing your extraction, it can be quite an ordeal to get clean cannabinoid fractions.
What machine are you running BTW?
Thanks for your support! As the industry here in Europe is quite small I prefer not giving brands -it would be very easy to find me…-.
We have 1 co2 line, 1 ethol line, 1 fractionnary sfc + hplc. All the toys to try and improve 