1.) CIELO crystal formation vs. water content
Here is just a small test to check what is the influence of the water content on the crystal formation. Loveall and coworkers found a nice sweet spot at around 2,3 wt-% of water, which should be the fridge-level equilibrium of water miscibility with Ethyl Acetate. So a CIELO extraction was done and the resulting EA was completely dried with MgSO4. A prior brine wash was not done, as this could probably remove some Mescaline (it's quite a little soluble in water). Afterwards simply the corresponding amount of water was added - not by volume, but by mass, so it is quite comparable to the water-EA-table of the CIELO tek shown here. Afterwards Citric Acid was added in accordance with the mass ratio of CA to EA also given in the CIELO TEK. Then pictures of the corresponding crystallization were simply taken and the weight shown in that graph. Note that the Y-Axis is rather random, it was just normalized with it's highest number to 1. Totaly yield in % would be cooler, but the EA was taken from the first extraction pull and not from all pulls combined, so calculating back to a full yield in % is not possible, allthough when scaling up it would be a roughly 0,4 % of Mescaline Citrate in that first pull, which might make sense. In any way, absolute values are not the intersting stuff here.
What can be seen here?
First row:
The first row will demonstrate the aliquots of the EA going from chemically dry (0 %) to freezer dry (~2 %) to fridge dry (~2,3 %) and even no drying (~3 %). As no citric acid was added in the first row, there is nothing interesting ...
Second row:
Here this is a picture just 2-5 minutes after adding the citric acid to all 7 aliquots. First you might think not much happening, but if you observe closely you can see the clouds of Mescaline Citrate forming. It is the darker green stuff. Of course the Mescaline Citrate is not dark green, but instead the tiny crystallites will create light scattering and this simply will make the EA look darker. Now here comes the cool thing: you could draw a perfect line from 0 % at the bottom to 3 % at nearly max height. So in other words you can perfectly see how clouding gets stronger the more water is added. But that does not by itself mean Mescaline Citrate precipitation is stronger the more water is added - instead I believe this is more simply the precipitation speed. Citric Acid is very poorly soluble in 100 % dry EA. Therefore in order to get into contact with the Mescaline Freebase it must be dissolved first in order to undergo any acid-base-reaction. So the more water that is also in the EA the faster the EA can be dissolved and form Mescaline Citrate clouds. So I guess this is not definetly a sign that a lot of water is needed, but only that it would speed up the process.
Third row:
Here you see the final result after 1 week. Therefore all the CA should have dissolved and what can be seen should be Mescaline Citrate. Still I believed with very low water content maybe not all the CA was dissolved and would now add to the weight, introducing a potential error to yield-determination at low water content, but I think that was not the case actually as written below. In any way you can see that whatever crystals are seen look pretty bad at very low water content. It is more like a spread-out fine cover across the bottom, hard to scrape up if desired. Instead higher water content will grow the true CIELO crystals, but also some bigger chunks have been seen here. But as 1 week was given in time and also the chunks partially grew up the walls, I believed it might not be any CA anymore.
Fourth row:
Now here is the graph comparing all the weight. Of course just the whole container weight after-vs-before so it did not matter that the low-water-content-stuff was not removable. Here as told before it is simply set to 100 % regarding the highest yield. Now as I first was believing maybe I partially got some CA either at low water content (low solubility) or high water content (chunks) into this weight, I believe now this looks all like Mescaline Citrate. This is obviously not a true determination, but nearly all the samples have the same weight and actually except for 2,5 % the deviation is simply 1 or 2 mg, so basically NOTHING. Therefore I am pretty sure that all aliquots dropped their Mescaline Citrate quite efficiently, even the super-low water content samples, which might just take longer to complete the Freebase-CA-reaction.
Now of course the one very cool thing coming to eye is that the water content of 2,5 % is having the highest yield. That is also pretty close to what you would get when doing a fridge decant and found by Loveall and coworkers. I was actually thinking it looks a little bit weird, as I would also just assume if all the other samples dropped all their Alkaloids, then this sample should be also on the same level. But in any way if this sample is even higher than the other it is just even more congruent with the data that made up the CIELO Tek, so I guess then this might be no anomaly.
Of course this was just a small test with a small volume. The scales used for determining all weights (EA weight, water-volume, CA weight, precipitation weight) should be very precise and not induce any big error. But when more handling very small volumes like this then anyways a statistically relevant view can only be given when repeaing that whole stuff. But just as a small experiment it looks quite in accordance to the data that made up the CIELO Tek. Furthermore to me it looks like even a dry to nearly-dry EA will drop all the alkaloids. Solubility of CA in EA is not completely 0, so over time the full alkaloids might precipitate anyways. But as seen above and already confirmed by the CIELO Tek, a too low water content will not produce any "usable crystals", though technically what you might see is just the same alkaloid yield.
Now to get a better understanding how water might play a role in the formation of possible CIELO crystals another analysis was done.
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That was also the last experiment that I had in mind, so it fits very well with not being able to do any experiments anymore, anyways 