So my question about celite is I’ve seen that you can soak the celite with water to make a 1/4 inch thick patty. My understanding this is to help it filter correctly. Is this soaking thing only done using a buccal funnel and flask with a pump? Or are you supposed to soak the celite when using it for inline/cls extractions as well? As always thanks to all of you in advance for any help. #Fortune42004life
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Typically celite is used as a filtration aid to catch small particles and prevent premature clogging of filter paper / filter disc. In order to make a celite cake you would typically make a slurry first in your solvent of choice (for our purposes I don’t think you would ever use water). To make the slurry you just add solvent to celite in a mason jar or some other container, mix it up so the celite is mostly suspended in the solvent and then pour that slurry onto your buchner funnel. As you pull vacuum you suck the solvent thru creating a nice cake of celite which is ideally nice and flat. Then you can put a piece of filter paper on top of the cake and pour in whatever you are trying to filter. The filter paper on top helps to keep the celite cake from getting deformed from pouring.
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Fill buchner with celite. Use a wood dowel to pack down. Pull vac, pour solvent in. Tap down cake with dowel again while the vac settles the celite in a cake. Turn off vac. Dunp collected solvent back into bucket. Now begin filtering.
Tip
If filtering slows down, use a spoon and carefully scrape off the top sediment layer. Use a spoon and dump celite into buchner and continue.
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Ok and how about for use in a closed loop? Would you still make the cake with a slurry first?
@FicklePickle or @StoneD may be able to answer that. I thought this was pertaining to buchner filtering.
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I stopped using Celite.
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How come? I was actually about to add it to my crc… possibly while trying the tampon tek in it as well. I just need better filtration my 1 micron sintered disc almost didn’t hold it back so I want a good filter setup before I do it again.
You’d dry pack this. We’re only wet packing celite when running ethanol
Using celite and tampon tek at the same time is quite redundant
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so if ubhave proper filtration u dont bother w the de or celite?
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Both the de and the tampon are there to catch fines that sneak by.
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I used DE for my first few runs…then stopped because it provided no benefit to my process. I run the tampon tek…
The nice thing about the tampon tek is when you remove the tampon, you can very clearly see if it was catching anything. Definitely helped me up my filtration game seeing what was getting caught there.
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