S1 E05 - Solvent Recovery In Cannabis Extraction

Learn the ins and outs of solvent recovery from Ray Van Lenten, founder and CTO of Trusteel. Trusteel's falling film evaporators completely revolutionized the solvent recovery game in 2018. Since then they've released an end to end suite of equipment to take you all the way through the extraction and distillation processes. Hear how Trusteel's gear can help break your lab's bottlenecks and streamline your operation. Ray gives us some awesome tips and tricks to speed you up on the falling film that definitely aren't in the owner's manual. Hear his SOPs for solvent recovery on the Autovap line, and his SOPs for decarboxylation in the DR-10. We've got times, temperatures, pressures, and feed rates on all the gear, and a special bonus at the end of the episode... METAL!EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Jason Showard - 00:00:11 Hello and welcome to episode five of The Modern Extractor. The podcast that focuses on the processes, equipment and science found inside a cannabis extraction laboratory. I'm your host, Jason Showard, and I work professionally in the cannabis extraction field. Here in season one, we're focusing on ethanol extraction and post processing. With each episode digging deep into a particular stage in that process. The shows are released in an order that follows the workflow through a lab, as material makes its way from cultivar to concentrate.  Jason Showard - 00:00:40 Last week on The Modern Extractor, we had Maria Peterson on from Scott Laboratories to help us break down the intricacies of filtration. She's my go to filtration expert over at Scott. And with the help of her and Scott products, I've been able to get beautifully filtered extracts for years. Upon listening back to last week's show, it occurred to me that I really didn't mention Buechner filters and vacuum filtration. Probably because my brain somehow blocked it out as a defense mechanism.  Jason Showard - 00:01:06 But this is the way things were done for a long time. It's a very slow and miserable process where lots of things can go wrong. There's messes and broken filter papers and the list goes on. It's just not recommended for production scale. But for lab scale, it's not terrible to have one around for experiments. If you're using vacuum filtration or Buechner filters for production, Scott Labs' lenticular will absolutely change your life. Also, upon listening back, I realized that I didn't stress quite enough how important it is to filter while cold.  Jason Showard - 00:01:35 I've always tried to make sure that my miscella made its way through the filter before it had a chance to rise above -35 Celsius. Moving on to this week's show, let's catch back up with our material on its way through the lab. We've performed a cold ethanol extraction in a centrifuge, and cold filtered through a lenticular filter. This leaves us with a nicely filtered mix of cannabis oil dissolved in ethanol, which we refer to as tincture or miscella.  Jason Showard - 00:01:59 The next stage in the process is almost every extraction operations bottleneck, which is solvent recovery. One of our show's listeners, Tommy Ethanol, hit me up on Future4200 and said that I shouldn't skip over Rotary Evaporators and jump right into falling film evaporation. He's right. I shouldn't. I really wanted to, but I shouldn't. I think rotovaps for solvent recovery fall into a similar category in my mind, as the Buechner filtration I mentioned a few minutes ago. Something we'd all like to forget but are worth mentioning.  Jason Showard - 00:02:26 If anything, an understanding of the way things were for so long...