Awesome, I’ll give it a shot and see how it turns out. Thanks for your help.
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I would check the seals and find out what material they are made from too.
just incase ethanol will effect them.
I am pretty ruff on vacuum pumps and they still seem to work.
you can buy seal kits for most good vacuum pumps too if you find that they
have reacted with the small amounts of ethanol your dry ice trap does not catch.
I doubt a H2O Ice trap would be cold enough best use dry ice.
also have a bleed valve just before the vacuum pump.
you will not need to pull full vacuum on the system to get the results your after
and this will decrease the likely hood of ethanol escaping your trap.
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We have tried the whole press thang. IMO it’s not as good as centrifugal force. We were using a VERY over engendered “press” from TLS and the amount of solvent that was left in the biomass was atrocious. It was air assisted and some kinda 20 ton press or something still wasnt enough. Panda or screw press will do you a lot better
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I think a hydraulic press can be a great first step, following it up with a screw press.
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Anyone played with one of these?
Shockingly cheap, can serve as both a soak tank and also initial separation of solids from tincture with auto-dispensing mechanism. Dispense solids into screw press for further recovery. I think this would beat the pants off a centrifuge in cost-effectiveness if it was dialed in. 10000 lb capacity is considered medium-small by their standards.
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The issue with pressing is the other junk you squish out. A homemade expeller press is actually pretty effective at removing your solvent, especially for the budget of $1-300 though
True. I think at a certain point though you just need to accept that. I think the whole cryo-centrifuge approach is limited to a very narrow range of production capacities. And people persevere in that approach and end up in a silly situation where their employees are running around filling up 10 centrifuges. Better to use dirty extraction if it’s scalable, as long as the needed post processing is also scalable.
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I went through the bucket tek thread, great stuff, and I saw that a lot of people are using pandas and washing machines, and unfortunately the position I’m in is that I’m trying to get licensed so I don’t think they’ll be to code for processing solvents. I think eventually I’ll be in centrifuge territory but for now I could only process 600kg a year anyhow. Thank you for the link regardless.
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Absolutely agree. I think the cryo fuge method is only one of 100 good ways to skin the cat but is so popular because it’s now a well established method. The larger the scale, the more steps can be afforded to improve cost:output efficiency and like I’ve harped on enough here already, cooling process to -80 is very hard on variable cost
Yes, I have. Very good inline with screw presses in a large-scale etOH extraction system. You must replace the gaskets and seals with material designed for 190 proof etOH; the prefabbed seals of this unit are designed for 20% etOH concentrations and if you run regular extraction contents through… your seals will pop and the bladder of the pneumatic wine press will eventually fail.
@MagisterChemist has been to extractech (long before we were there)
You never saw the wine bladder press? It was he second big oval shapped press in the extraction line up (after the big screw press)
I did, but i never saw it working (it was down for repairs).
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Not too hard. I found a company that works with jaegermeister for their herb soaks and so it’s already made for high alcohol content.
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You must remember, I was also at Extractech long before you were there. Magister had just left when I showed up.
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Centrifuges are sweet because you can extract and spin dry in the same thing
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Depends on the centrifuges and what your local code says/requires for the MAQs involved.
NSEP doesn’t have any centrifuges that are floodable afaik sadly, and those ones you won’t have any issues with the fire marshal, but a lot of the floodable Chinese 'fuges aren’t UL listed and don’t have the engineering certs you’d need to get them to be passed in an inspection for a legal lab.
Re: OP’s question about putting your biomass into a large buchner: if you’re extracting at room temp this will kinda work, but the additional airflow will mean more evaporation and higher solvent losses versus just drip-drying. If you’re doing cold extraction it’s going to warm your ethanol up to near-room temps which means you’ll pull out fats and waxes you’ll have to remediate for later on.
Same concern follows for presses (hydraulic, screw or otherwise) you squeeze out a lot of crap. Centrifuges don’t get everything but they can usually hit 90%+ liquid recovery with a long enough cycle time (dependent on size and G-forces involved, naturally)
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The floodable centrifuges I design and sell are certifiable virtually anywhere on the planet.
how much gforce and rpm does a fuge need to remove 95%+ of solvent?
Medium