Warm or Cold Ethanol Extraction Poll

  • Warm/ Room Temp
  • Cold (-20 to -40)
  • Colder (-40 to -80)

0 voters

Hey Future4200,

This has been a highly contested debate in our lab lately, and I am just looking to bring some stats into the conversation. We operate at a commercial scale, currently employing room temp ethanol extraction. We are in the process of scaling equipment, hence the new debate on whether to scale in room temp fashion, or to invest in equipment that will allow us to do colder extractions at scale. Mainly looking for votes, but any anecdotal support to either side is also welcome.

Also if anyone has run room temp ethanol extract through a wiper with minimum post processing to clean it up before hand, I would love to hear from you.

Personally, I think it really depends on what scale you’re going up to. It’s certainly more efficient on a very large scale to run room temp and put all of the downstream processes in place to winterize and carbon filter. I really only think this makes sense at a very large industrial scale where you have all the proper permits in place to be able to have a significant amount of ethanol on site. The downstream processes needed from a room temp extraction are going to cause you to have a lot more WIP (work in progress) meaning more ethanol in various stages of completion. You’re going to have to invest in cold storage tanks for winterization at this rate anyway. If you run cold, as long as you can make sure you get through your filter before the temperature climbs above -35c you should be fine in the mid range without winterizing or carbon filtering. If you’re going to run larger batches you may need to start slightly lower than -40 so that you can get it run and filtered before the temperature rises too much.

2 Likes

so imo the idea of using a single solvent to one and done it is a little old school to me, there are a ton of ways to go about this shit. But as for me, we are getting ready to switch to room temp heptane extraction, water wash and some light cromo, membrane separation to FFE, winterize in a second solvent, FFE (eventually adding a second Membrane). wiper first pass then cromo or wiper depending. but we have had great results so far. figure out how much cold solvent you need and at what rate. the cost of all the chillers, building a heat room, building AC, cost of electricity. shits mind bogolling. why not just use LN2 if you like burning money.