One of my co workers in Oregon has heard from 2 different sources that this new sonic water extractor is going to be the death of everyone out there. Does anyone have real info on it or the process. I can’t imagine you just dunk it in water, turn on the vibrator and be done.
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Well, I’m skeptical, because no matter how efficient the extraction method the saturation concentrations of water are too low to make it an efficient extraction system, right? Both EtOH and the pure hydrocarbons all extract very efficiently within hours (at most). Extraction really isn’t a limiting problem, am I wrong?
It’s not.
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Call the guy at sonicextractor. This doesn’t work for our manufacturing process and they sold enough of em thinking it would, now he’s pissed and blames the people who bought the million dollar magic machine that never worked and won’t work
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Went to his site and he still has “hemp oil extraction”. For a system he claims he’s pissed people are buying he hasn’t changed his site or claims.
they won’t let you see any samples of product extracted unless you pay a 200K engineering fee.
bogus.
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I know I don’t have all the experience you all do with extraction. But my understanding is that water cavitation extraction does not really extract, it just liberates the oils from the plant trichomes. So after cavitation you have the trichomes broke off the plant and burst open. The trick then becomes how to separate all that oil out of the water plant slurry.
So its not like there is a saturation point of the water like there is with EtOH.
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Huh. I guess if you think of it as another mechanical extraction technology rather than a solvent one it makes a lot more sense. Nonzero, anyways.
I mean, it still seems stupid to me overall, as you’re going to be shredding the cell walls and getting EVERYTHING that’s in the plant. But yeah it should also shake loose the good stuff from the trichomes. In this case the water is just a carrier media like when making use hash.
With that said, I’d rather just make ice hash.
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There was a guy at the Oregon Hemp Convention pushing a system for this but they were saying it was for extraction directly into carrier oil. Like infusing mct directly from the plant rather than in the traditional method. The only reason I could ever see using this would be in a backasswards state that had issue with hemp oil concentrate existing even in processing labs. Otherwise its just a magicbutter machine with an extra 0 on the price.
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The one I saw some pictures of looked epic. It basically was a closed loop system that agitates the material in one chamber as water passes through it. The water then flows to a separate chamber that drops the extract and moves the clean water back to the agitation chamber.
It was LARGE, my best guess would be 100 lbs or more in a run.
Edit: I’m pretty sure it used membrane filtration to separate everything, it was claimed that it even separates terpenes that are miscible with water.
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I wonder how many other valuable compounds are present in our essential oil when a complete extraction of the plant takes place. Obviously we can use the terps and other cannabinoids, but could we not sell other components once they’d been isolated as well?
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Flavanoids are definitely valuable as well, been reading about Apigenin and Kaempferol lately, both of which have psychoactive and medicinal benefits, its funny how it works, but after all my research this article popped up on facebook…
So maybe Cannflavin is one of the valuable ones too.
Hell, people will buy straight chlorophyl
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After looking further into it, yes, this appears just like a trichome/bubble hash pre-extractor that just adds cost. There might be a niche use for it for people who want to decolorize without carbon, but that’s basically it. Damn, what a waste.
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The part that makes me interested in it is how fast they claim it works and that you can process green fresh hemp. So from a farmer perspective, it would be a game changer if you could use a forage harvester to cut and chop 10+ acres a day and run it immediately through one of these cavitation units.
No drying is huge! Since drying is the biggest risk and bottle neck on the farm.
Even if you get a messier product out, at least your 100 acres of grow is preserved in a concentrated, small, manageable size that you can refine down at your leisure.
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if sonication worked well for solventless extracts people would be using it for a smaller scale, high frequencies work well to break apart particles and cause slight agitation but not enough to knock off trichomes most people use a washing type machine or paddle. but it is a closed loop system im not sure how it works, high pressure water in a pressurized vessel would strip it but it would strip all the materials we consider impurity’s so seems like a pretty crude method to me…
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I don’t think this is as dumb as people make it sound (assuming it works at all). Yes, you need to do post-processing with solvents to actually clean it up as it’s just cell/trichome juice. But if you’re extracting on say the 100,000 lb/day level, I can see you being happy you can use water for initial concentration and then only have to use 1000 gallons of solvent for cleanup instead of 10,000 for extraction.
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@MagisterChemist putting it at that scale makes this sound a lot more appealing, but I still feel like the oil it creates will be pretty… gross. Is this saying that it will lyse the cells and pull the cannabinoids out? I would guess that lots of other… things… would be in the oil as well.
My understanding of how this works is that no actual dissolving takes place. It just uses extreme force to pull the oils off the plant and form an oil-water mixed up slurry, which is then separated into oil and water fractions in a separating centrifuge. So you’ll end with some pretty impure (but very “natural” and full spectrum) concentrate. But with enough effort i’m sure that can be repaired with post treatment with sorbents/lle/membranes/distillation/etc, potentially at lower cost than if you tried to do a whole solvent based extraction high-hazard facility at comparable scale.
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But with the clean-up you’ll have high hazard situations anyway. And 100k per day, yeah right. That produces about 4k liters of oil. You still need to winterize and at 5:1 that 20k liters or over 5k gals of solvent. It’s a gimmick and at the end of the day it all comes down to cost per unit. And I’m not seeing it with this tech.
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