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Pre-extraction defatting

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Trickster

Trickster

Esteemed member
OG Pioneer
Chemical engineer
Swim is extracting finely powdered mhrb in her homemade Continuous Solid-Liquid Extractor.

She is still struggling with extractor clogging problem. At the beginning of the process the extractor has to be emptied and reloaded 3-4 times and then there is no more clogging.

Swim noticed that clogging stops once the sticky tarry stuff has been extracted. So she thought of defatting the powder prior to running the extractor. To make defatting more efficient she freezed-thawed mhrb soaked in acidified water several times. She believes this will break cell walls and make the tarry stuff more accessible for heptane.
 
This seems like it is a great idea. In my soxhlet experiments it seemed like the mhrb powder would get wet, but then the acid would not pass through the mass of the mhrb like it was made of wax or the like. Next time I will soak the powder in a small amount of acid (acetic) to assure that the spice is acidified and therefore not soluble in hexane. Then I will run at least two defat steps to hopefully remove the oils and fats from the powder. After that I'll load the soxhlet, and see if it cycles properly. What do you think?
 
rivea said:
This seems like it is a great idea. In my soxhlet experiments it seemed like the mhrb powder would get wet, but then the acid would not pass through the mass of the mhrb like it was made of wax or the like. Next time I will soak the powder in a small amount of acid (acetic) to assure that the spice is acidified and therefore not soluble in hexane. Then I will run at least two defat steps to hopefully remove the oils and fats from the powder. After that I'll load the soxhlet, and see if it cycles properly. What do you think?
Click to expand...

That's what swim is planning to do. Only she will freeze-thaw the soaked powder sevaral times to make sure that most of the plant cells are broken so the defatting will be more efficient.
 
Pre-extraction de-fatting proved to be ineffective for reducing extractor clogging.

Does anybody on this forum use on regular basis an extractor (Soxhlet or any other) for extracting spice from finely powdered mhrb?
 
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