I have been searching future4200 for a bit today but do not see this topic mentined specifically. I have been dealing with two strains of Co2 oil failing RSA - for the third time now over the past two months. The oil was brought up to 90C on our Heidolph and then went into the vac oven at 180f for a now total of 16 hours. Stirring every 30 minutes for the last 8 hours with no bubbling visible.
Could the added terpenes remaining in the oil be causing our RSA failures? In our third test, our ethanol increased 1%…which should not be possible given we added no additional solvent after our previous tests.
I have since tested other oils for RSA with no added terpenes which all pass well below 5000ppm with about an hour in the vacuum oven. Any advice/thoughts on what to do would be appreciated!
Methanol and some other solvent compounds are naturally found in the plant in small amounts sometimes. At least that’s what SC labs told us when we kept failing for methanol and acetone when we didn’t use either as a solvent in the live extracts control room.
Strange for sure! Pretty interesting though how many variables can exist within a given sample.
I just heard back from our lab and they seem to have come to a similar consensus that it could be terpenes or other compounds that are causing the false failures.
Ethanol specifically yes… cant seem to pass after almost 2 months. As we only have one lab to test with, and no in house HPLC we are ‘stuck’ to say the least. Unless I heat the terpenes out of the oil maybe…but do not want to have them convert into other compounds.
Try a different lab if you somehow can. Extract cbd send it over statelines? I know my situation is not the same but we were failing for aspergillus fumigatus. They tried making us “throw” out 100s of lbs of freshly harvested indoor(in rooms that had UVC lighting to kill said mold) we knew it was BS. If they can make our clean buds(we tested clean at 3 other labs but were forced to remediate either way ) test dirty thru failure of proper cleaning procedures of a incubator. i could easily see someone not evaporating all the ethanol out?
this is of course just a shot in the dark. good luck!
Its crazy how different tests results are between different labs…we are trying to find a second lab to test residuals, but we cannot cross statelines unfortunately as it is cannabis derived oil. We will see what happens…Thanks for the input!!
Analytical results are like clocks.
If you only have one you think you know what the time is.
If you have two and they disagree, you are confused.
And if you have three, you can take an average, throw out the outlying data point and then maybe you know what time it is.
They used to be The Werc Shop and have been analyzing cannabis since 2009. They also do the residual solvent analysis for various terpene blend formulators. Those analysis can be very tricky as some terpenes can convert to acetone and other compounds as they sit in the headspace sampler.
Seconding what @SWELL said here, I have run into issues in the past with terpenes converting to acetone/alcohols as a result of the GC headspace method being run. You may want to reach out to the lab and ask them if they can modify their parameters, or try running the analysis again with a higher level of dilution on the sample.
I haven’t come across ethanol-terpene azeotropes, however ethanol and water like to form them and there could be some potential interaction there if the water contains hydrosols. Not something I can speak to with any certainty but just a thought.
) test dirty thru failure of proper cleaning procedures of a incubator. i could easily see someone not evaporating all the ethanol out?