Unknown White Powder Isolated from THCa Crystal Growing

From 1 hour of extremely stoned digging i have a crazy idea.
You also are running isomerization with sulfuric acid which is neutralized by sodium hydroxide, yielding sodium bisulfate as a byproduct.

β- Sitosterol smells bad

β- Sitosterol exists in cannabis, and in your extract.

The sodium bisulfate is reacting with β- Sitosterol to form a β- Sitosterol ester, making it water soluble.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.526.8332&rep=rep1&type=pdf

As far as i can tell from the patent, if you have the catalyst present with β- Sitosterol you have the proper conditions during distillation, as a solvent is not needed for the reaction to take place

If this was incredibly wrong, it was fun coming up with. Admittedly I made several guesses here as I don’t have anywhere near a full grasp of what the fuck i am even talking about.

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Please don’t do that. :grinning:.

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its so much worse than any terpene I have ever smelled come out of a lab.

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We’re a state licensed lab, and all biomass coming in is tested, and we havent had any pesticides pop up on a test of yet, not ruling it out but we haven’t had to remediate as of yet.

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it is a very similar smell to sulfur, just so much more potent, like a sulfur mixed with smelling salts.

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Reviving an old thread here, sorry. This is my first post. I’m new to this forum, and the cannabis industry as a whole, but I am a trained synthetic/medicinal chemist.

If you are saying this material is insoluble in ethanol and stinks, it’s likely a concatenated mercaptan of some kind. Those things are notoriously insoluble.

I’m also curious if there is a ‘standardized’ prep for isolating THCA sans chromatography. I’ve got a few ideas, but I thought I would ask the forum first. I did a quick search and this and a couple of similar threads popped up.

Thanks and looking forward to chatting with all of you!

C

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Welcome to the future @chemdawginit!

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Welcome chemdawginit

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canning jar… see: Only The Strong sauce tek

followed by centrifugation (possibly still in that canning jar!!). see: YOC Dirty Diamond Tek - THCa isolation from Crude

or you could try something a little more radical: Who needs a diamond master? just bc I can again 👊💚😉

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Awesome, thank you for the leads!

suddenly I want to load this 800mm basket centrifuge with c18…

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Ok, so more specifically, chromatography was always a specialty of mine. I don’t currently have that luxury though, and I never really spent a lot of time on crystallization techniques. That said, I’ve got some pretty clean material that foams up and can be ground into a powder. I’m guessing 80-90% pure. I made it from CO2 and ethanol derived crude. What’s the best way to get that to crystallize? Just take it up in pentane and put it in a mason jar? Does it need pressure? I’ve tried some simple ethanol/water conditions, but I’m finding that THCA really loves to trap solvent. This stuffs a lot harder to work with than I gave it credit for. Sitting in a -20C freezer overnight doesn’t seem to do much so far either. I really just started to play with it though. I’ve only been extracting for a few months. I was hoping there was some sort of standard solvent system that doesn’t involve a c1d1 lab. (i.e. at a certain purity level, X volumes of Y solvent under Z conditions leads to crystals)

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That might can be purchased…but I haven’t seen it laying around anywhere.

Pentane in a stainless reactor isn’t particularly difficult, but still requires more engineering controls that most seem to bother with imo.

Canning jars are great learning tools. Being seethru and all…

Pressure is not a requirement, but the lid really helps with controlled evaporation.

Thanks, that’s very helpful! I’ve been browsing this forum and there’s a lot of cool stuff! There’s a lot of the basics here that I’ve been missing. Thank again for the help!

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