What do you extract with and why?

T5 is bentonite.

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So big fat no on that. I’m getting tired of my pandas, third spout broke tonight and it also spat out a bunch of pieces that somehow, seemingly due to the etho making parts brittle, broke off…

Am about to turn my washing machine into a salad spinner, cause pandas have def helped me a lot, but this made me realize how much the etho fucks it up.

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Are you using food grade etoh or denatured?

Denatured is a no-no with plastics n such.

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190 organic cane sugar etho. Just saying the materials used in the panda seem to get brittle and break after heavy use.

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What kind of centrifuge are you using to spin dry your hexane soaked material? Wondering if my pandas will still work for this, I’ve already swapped out the spouts since they started to leak and cracked pretty quickly from using heptane denatured ethanol.

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Sounds sketchy bro be safe

No fuge for him. He’s using a salad spinner hacked washing machine. I’m about to do the same on his recommendation.

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Well, the issue with an azeotrope is that it is a vappr phase phenomenon that has its own boiling point… so the 20°C difference rule of thumb for fractional distillation of 2 different b.p. components would only apply between the b.p. of any amount of 1 of the 2 components that is present in excess of the azeotrope percentage and the b.p. of the azeotropic mixture of those 2 components.

As for the publication you posted, it is talking about changing the affinity between the ethanol and the hexane by introducing a compound with greater affinity for ethanol than hexane has, I believe. That is a common method for separating azeotropes. An easy one is using table salt to break the azeotrope of water and isopropanol.

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@Photon_noir
Thank you very much.

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I use a washing machine, the same one in the salad spinner thread. Keep the lid on and it works pretty good at keeping the vapor in

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you have access to a tig welder? or a local welding and fabrication shop should do it for a small fee, or a good friend maybe. you can get a stainless 1.5 " sanitary pipe weld on fitting to replace your panda spout

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ā€œsalting outā€

I ended up canceling my order for hexane from carbon chemistry since it had a 4 week lead time and ordered instead from BVV, they have it for $455/55 gallon. I ordered two barrels and two 5 gallon pails of heptane for only $1436 including shipping and tax.

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Why both? I’ve been opting for hexane because it’s less acutely toxic than heptane.

Also got this when getting hexane from lab alley.

"C4270 is 86% lab grade

C4271 is 99.9% ACS grade

C4273 is 95% ACS grade

ACS stands for American Chemical Society and is a higher grade of chemical than the lab grade."

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I plan to extract with the hexane and only use heptane for doing water/saline washes and wet scrubbing with T-5/T-41

This is my revised plan for crude preprocessing:

Flood 25l centrifuge with hexane (12lbs biomass in 6 gallons hexane)
Soak 10 min
Filter out sediment with 50l buchner
Recover hexane
Degum SOP columbo labs
Heptane/saline wash separatory funnel
Heptane T-5 scrub
Filter over celite 545
Heptane T-41 scrub
Filter over celite 545
Recover heptane
Dissolve in methanol
Warm winterize
Cold winterize
Recover methanol
Decarb in rotovap
Distill refined crude

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Hex is my favorite…

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I’m thinking you could save some time scrubbing t5 and t41 together, I’m also adding the alumina here. That’s what I’m gonna do together with the degumming clay being shipped to me.

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Which hex are you using?

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Cool I was wondering if I could do them both together or not. Would definitely save some time.

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You can definitely do that. After I’m done testing the degumming clay I’ll report back, but check the thread here already. It’s looking very promising over the old degumming ways. My OP is different from yours, but I haven’t found the exact ways to do it yet. I’m thinking of winterizing after the degum. Then roto again and do the methanol/hexane wash and separate out the methanol with sep funnel before roto takes out the hexane and then spd. But I use etho, so decarb happens after first roto for me.

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