Fable
Rising Star
I was helping a friend out with his first attempt at A/B extraction, the solvent used initially was xylene, I gave him as much instruction as I could but we ended up with the worst emulsion ever. Almost the whole organic phase was a brown/black emulsion.
Temperature wouldn't break it, so we added some shellite in the hope of drawing the xylene out but just ended up with more emulsion.
Leaving it for 2 weeks had no effect on the emulsion so I decided to increase the pH which also had very little effect, I added NaCl soln but nothing happened. I did notice that the aqueous phase was very dark so I thought I would siphon this off and add some hot water to the mix in the hope of washing the cause of the emulsion away. With every rinse the emulsion became lighter and lighter in colour and then started to break down, so I kept washing until the aqueous phase was weak looking like ice tea. At this point the organic layer was the colour of honey and large globs were forming in it. In a very short time we had 2 layers and were able to pour off the top organic followed by agitation to break the rest of the emulsion.
The washing had worked. What 2 weeks of settling couldn't do was remedied in 30 min of hot (50 Deg C) clean water washes.
5 ml of the organic was evaporated in a watch glass which confirmed the goodness was indeed intact.
Temperature wouldn't break it, so we added some shellite in the hope of drawing the xylene out but just ended up with more emulsion.
Leaving it for 2 weeks had no effect on the emulsion so I decided to increase the pH which also had very little effect, I added NaCl soln but nothing happened. I did notice that the aqueous phase was very dark so I thought I would siphon this off and add some hot water to the mix in the hope of washing the cause of the emulsion away. With every rinse the emulsion became lighter and lighter in colour and then started to break down, so I kept washing until the aqueous phase was weak looking like ice tea. At this point the organic layer was the colour of honey and large globs were forming in it. In a very short time we had 2 layers and were able to pour off the top organic followed by agitation to break the rest of the emulsion.
The washing had worked. What 2 weeks of settling couldn't do was remedied in 30 min of hot (50 Deg C) clean water washes.
5 ml of the organic was evaporated in a watch glass which confirmed the goodness was indeed intact.
Yeah, - SWIM will try this tomorrow and report what happens. SWIM will run a generous amount of the salt over the organic and swirl swirl swirl to see if it eats up that emulsion. Any one tried this?