Separatory Funnel Size

[AgentOfTruth]

Hello ~
Wondering about the minimum size of Separatory Funnel needed for a 100g MH extraction...500ml? 1000?
Thanks in advance...

 

[Transform]

This may well be true, but getting the base tea into the pipette and having it coat the inside of that is also massively irritating, and incredibly difficult to avoid with the last portion of solvent. Separation funnel is on my wish list for the new year, for sure.

There are a few tricks that help make this unavoidable occurrence far less of an issue. One is to use an inverted funnel to press onto the surface of the mixture and gather up the thin layer of the naphtha into a more manageable layer. The other is to catch the droplets of base soup by using a pyrex jug with a little sodium carbonate solution as an intermediate washing vessel for the naphtha before it goes into the precipitation dish. This latter trick could also be performed using a sep funnel, simplifying the draining off of the SC solution.

Thirdly, when using a sep funnel with lighter-than-water NPS - after draining an aqueous layer out of the stopcock, pour the NPS back out of the neck if there are too many base droplets still stuck around the spout.

I do find it incredibly difficult not to get caught up in the fiddling around, obsessing over separating everything perfectly, so these three tips have helped a lot in saving time with that.

 

[acacian]

Yeah.. I don't find it really takes anymore than a few moments for any residual base tea to re-separate so that's a non issue for me. I always rinse my solvent afterwards anyways so any residual base mixture in the funnel just gets washed into the clean polar solution.

But.. I was reminded this in another thread: For those doing A/B (especially if testing different plants) I would say that a filtration setup is probably the most crucial thing aside from your extraction vessel. If you get a simple hand held buchner filtration setup then you get a buchner flask which you can use for mixing your solvent and base soup. And then the filter and pump help you refine your mixture during the acid phase.

I can say that the most time I waste during extractions is filtration. The 2nd is waiting for emulsions to break; which likely wouldn't even be an issue had more precise filtration taken place. Filtration to me has become the most important thing to sort out in extraction. Sep funnel ain't nothing if your mixture isn't refined enough to separate.