Thoughts on Soxhlet Extractor for Live Resin?

So, Soxhlet extractors or continuous extractors are often used to extract organic compounds.

The material chamber (Soxhlet thimble) would have to be jacketed, but I think there is some serious potential with this. I was curious if anyone has tried it out.

1 Like

I would imagine the member with the name @Soxhlet would be the perfect person to answer this…Why have the screen name soxhlet if you havent worked with this extensively. LOL

10 Likes

Pretty sure those are generally meant for ethanol, which is somewhat counter-productive for live resin. What solvent did you plan to use?

5 Likes

Yeah… I currently extract with ethanol so I’m looking for an alternative for live runs. Butane is not allowed in Florida at the moment.

Pentane would be the ideal solvent. I’m aware that it would extract plenty of fats as well, but you would theoretically be able to recover ALL of the cannabinoids and terpenes present in your flower.

3 Likes

What are the allowable solvents down there?

Funny, I’m from Jacksonville, wonder how the market looks.

My guess is that you would over-extract non-target compounds. THC is fairly easy to extract since it’s stored in trichomes on plant exterior.

2 Likes

@THChemist so who do you work for down here in the sunshine state? Seems like there are quite a few of us down here? And there are only so many companies licensed for this…

I know of another member that just left a big outfit here in FL.

5 Likes

@Killa12345 I DMed you :ok_hand:t2:

2 Likes

Maybe you could set it up to extract cold by having an ultra cold reflux and no heat on bottom just deep vac. Otherwise its gonna be a crude extraction that requires a lot of clean up imo

Side note: if you could rig this up to run cold pentane you could possibly use it to wash diamonds off

10 Likes

:clap: I think you just figured it out. I’m going to do some R&D over the next few weeks once I get my set up.

2 Likes

I believe the doh just disapproves of butane. I only know of EtOH and CO2 being used currently.

2 Likes

Are you talking about jacketing the thimble to acheive a cold extraction?

4 Likes

I think that would be ideal. If the material was kept as low as possible and the pentane was as cold as possible the amount of undesirables would potentially be reduced.
However, I don’t know what that temperature would be, I don’t have experience extracting with pentane.

I know that cold pentane will still dissolve cannabinoids and terpenes, and still has a very high vapor pressure. I’ve learned this from experimenting with recrystalizations.

There’s a chance though that the temp doesn’t really matter and the solubility of undesirables won’t change in pentane rendering the cooling useless.

Thoughts?

3 Likes

The pentane will pull more waxes than etoh, which is more selective at low temps.

4 Likes

Agreed, that’s definitely a fact.

But the goal is to do live runs and ethanol tinctures create an emulsion in the presence of that much water.

not if the biomass is frozen the entire time. The h20 is locked up as ice.

6 Likes

The point of a soxhlet is actually a little different. In short it is meant for reducing the amount of solvent needed by constantly cycling over the material. You would ideally choose a solvent that would have minimal solubility with your target compound and basically zero solubility in the unwanted compounds. If you cycle the minimally aggressive solvent over your target compound you’ll eventually get a good yield while using very little actual solvent.

7 Likes

I was thinking of running a soxhlet under 100 micron With ethanol. Seems like with etoh setups people are doing a long soak time (15-45 min). If you had the right condenser speed you could probably run 3-4 solvent washes in the same amount of time, plus be able to evaporate in the same vessel. This might be a pretty efficient little setup. I think most people are running 80% efficiency with Ethanol, I wonder if this would do better?

1 Like

You’ve got the right Idea, just with the wrong equiment. An extractor like that might work for someone very small scale, but it dosent scale up past that.

2 Likes

Buddy of mine is part of one of the LIC down in Florida and I was unaware that butane wasn’t an option.

3 Likes