So the other day I accidently hooked up to my vapor port instead of liquid.
I was looking in the sightglass for the drop but nothing was coming so I burped it for a while and still nothing I was tripping but then I noticed the vapor liquid mistake. However the smell that came off the burp was so good and just like the plant. This got me thinking. Would it be possible to say pass vapor off butane or propane since it likes Terps more and basically distill over into another tank but hook up cold traps to catch the terpenes as it passes through? I’m thinking this could also help make stuff that doesn’t come as stable more stable by stripping the hard to remove terps off in the beginning so the purge is more efficient. What do you guys think?
Btw I used one of those sintered mufflers to.burp so It really did a good job of diffusing the smell into.the air
If you ever have ran a rotovap, and happened to experience “bumping” , then a big stain of oil gets left on the glass directly in the vapor path. What happens when you feed that oil with hot vapor is kind of cool. With just enough hot vapor of the right solvent I notice the oil turns into a white powder residue that resembles isolate. Too much vapor and it all just washes off. It seems like polar solvents and non polar solvents will have different effects.
So you want to butane-steam-still your biomass? Sounds like a fun experiment. Id run your material column hot at like 100 deg f and connect the vapor path just like a regular steam still. Once the run is complete u might have a sticky mess or hopefully some really dry biomass. Follow that run up with a normal dry ice butane extraction should have some nice isolate! I wonder if this is j12 guys tek…
So one of the reasons butane and propane are good for stripping terpenes is because they each boil off at a low enough temperature that you can purge solvent out of your crude while not heating it up high enough to just boil all your terpenes away. Some of the low boiling terpenes you’re still going to lose (because they boil at lower than room temperature anyway). But ideally, you’d be able to recover your butane, and then maybe do a second slightly higher temperature purge that would be your “terp” purge.
We do closed-loop butane extractions here and we’ve been working on a similar sort of process to try to recover terpenes, but haven’t gotten super far with it.
Is it possible to extract with supercritical propane/butane?
Ive never done hydrocarbon ,only SCCO2.
Terpenes come out at around 100bar, then thc-a at higher bar, and D9 at up to 300bar.
Im wondering if the different “fractions” could be achieved and preserved in a similer
way with SCHydrocarbon.
I see that other industries use sub/supercritical hydrocarbons and other fluids to
target specific compounds.
I’m not super familiar with all the SC CO2 systems out there, but my base understanding is that yes you can but it still requires post-processing. I had a long conversation with an engineer at Waters about their prep CO2 system. With their system, they have a multi stage “step-down” where they crash out different fractions at different pressure steps (probably similar to other CO2 systems). The last step is a terpene and water fraction. He told me they were in the process of developing a 4 step system (this was back in the summer) that could split the terpenes and the water and recover each individually.
The downsides of this whole system were that the throughput was very small, runs took a long time, and every fraction still required some degree of post-processing or cleaning up to be considered an “end product”.
Illuminated extractors uses a “propane fog”. Im assuming they are using a saturated vapor of warm propane to extract. Seems to do a good job.
Ive been wanting to try a warm N2 gas stream “doped” with warm butane vapor (10%w/w or so of N2) and see what that does. Will also be neat to see how the “neat” alkane vapor works for this as well.
I dumped into a cold winterizing column…it built pressure because of the nitro…I remember hooking up the nitro on the liquid side so maybe it is the nitro butane vapor mix that strips
This talks about supercritical ethane, propane, butane, methanol, ethanol and afew others. Itsays any of these solvents or mixtures can be made to target very specific compounds under supercritical conditions. Along with being able to vary the temp and pressure, the extraction and refinment possibilities seem endless. It also claims successful testing of " Supercritical fluids can be coupled with complexing agents for the extraction of metal ions from aqueous solutions and solid and liquid matrices." Even targeting specific single terpenes, fats and oils…
Im not thinking this for an initial extraction, but to process crude or to clean distillate or remediation of any kind.
I am having good results with the following in a small scale
I ll try to get pic soon
Blast tube 3"x24"
Crc b80/silica60/celite
valve
Collectionpot 1 6"x24"
Valve
Collectionpot 2 6"x12"
So i pass 2 kg pure propane treu material catch in collection pot 2
Close valve
Blast 6 kg of butane catch in collection
Pot 1
Distill
The terps come out first in the propane
And the cannabinoids second in the butane
Only did 2 runs so far but serious
Results
The idea poped by a fellow member telling about this i can t find his post anymore
That pure propane gave HIM a waterclear terp fraqtion
But didn t use enough solvent to push all treu
This sparked my Ethane as solvent curiosity if that dislikkes cannabinoids even more then we have a winner
I guess all you need to do is
Place collection pot in dry ice and
Atach material tube to the vapor port of the tank and transfer al propane in a
passive Distillation Kinda way
(Darnit can t find the right words )
It does sound interesting, a more selective form of steam distillation for sure but how much cannabs will come over? Worth a try, similar to what people are doing with nitrogen but with butane
)