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Has anyone done this with cannabis? Are we able to do this at higher pressure in order to bring the temperature down? Otherwise you're looking at doing this extraction at 750F...
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I belive, water with ethanol will dissolve quite the same compounds, you need the find the right water/ethanol ratio, time and heat.
Of course, you need to get rid of the ethanol after the extraction, which is explosive, so ATEX vacuum evaporator will be needed.
Supercritical Water is sad to be green, but ethanol is also green as well, otherwise alcoholic beverages would be banned.
From my perspective, Supercritical Water is a very good sales tool with limited advanatage and high price.
Isn't water polar? I think it would pull a bunch of bs and no cannabinoids.
@FlashThunder Not water. Steam. That's why they call it the universal solvent. I was talking to an engineer recently about high pressure water extraction, he seems to think that the Palm Oil processors are eventually going to move in when we've reached a scale of production that makes their SOP's efficient, but also that we have a long way to go to reach that point with conventional extraction methods.
@ThomasWR Supercritical water isn't steam. Water isn't called the universal solvent because it has the ability to universally dissolve, it's because water dissolves more chemicals than any other liquid.
Interesting about the palm oil. Only application for sc h20 I've read about is power generation.
Aye, I'm aware that I didn't use the word supercritical. I should have clarified. I wasn't talking about Supercritical Water, I was relating a separate conversation regarding using water (steam) to separate cannabinoids at high pressure.
Something like this.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165993615001363
It was a random conversation over lunch in SODO one day.
Supercritical Water has different polarity than water at atm. pressure. check this: http://mazzainnovation.com/our-method/
check the link above this post. sc h20 is used for other puropse. imo- it's a great PR tool for certain industrial members, othrwise not cost effective.
Water is an extremely poor solvent for terpenes and supercritical water is highly reactive. Not only would you extract a lot of undesirable material from the plant, you would also chemically modify much of the target compounds. This already one of the problems with steam distillation of many medicinal essential oils.
"chemically modify much of the target compounds" Do you mean hydrolysis reaction? Does it has the same rate as in case of steam distillation?
SCH20 has a ton of potential, however there are several reasons that it will have issues to overcome in the canna community. SCH2O can and has been used in the analytics of cannabis, and allow for greater resolution in the identification of different isomers of the cannabinoids. however, at elevated temps, we have seen undesired pigments, as well as unwanted side reactions from the byproducts of hydrolysis and negatively affect the extraction). but For terpenoid extraction, one would be better off operating a hydro-distillation using a chilled extractor with a vacuum driven distillation. the cold hydro-distillation will reduce the O from forming via hydrolysis, reducing the unwanted oxidation. As SC extraction progresses, I am excited to see the development of SCH20 as well as SCN2 (with a triple point of -160).
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=18&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiysLz8-pjXAhUlr1QKHYJSCJ0QFgiOATAR&url=http://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/22/7/1186/pdf-vor&usg=AOvVaw0-6LGkCzQR6mgoMVPlKuh-