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xylene pulls

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Dwhitty76

Dwhitty76

Rising Star
swims friend did an a/b extraction about a month ago and did 3 naptha pulls w/ good results.

The aqueous solution has been sitting around for about a month or so..

He wants to see if he can pull anymore goodies out of the soluion, using xylene.

Question is, is that there appears to be a trace amount of naptha that is still laying ontop of the solution (not a distinct layer but you can tell there is a little naptha on top).

Does this matter?

should swim tell his buddy to dissolve a little from the solution to ensure that ther is no naptha in the jug before he adds the xylene?

Swim was gonna warm up the xylene before adding it to the solution , let it seperate then pull the goods and evap untill it's saturated then do a freeze precip.

sound right?

Any feedback would be much appreciated from my fellow nexians
:)
 
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it does not matter if theres naphtha in it.. but no you cannot do freeze precip, it doesnt work with xylene. The alkaloids are too soluble in it even at freezer temperatures. you have to evap it all the way, and xylene stinks like hell and take ages to evaporate. be sure to make this outside where there are no nosy neighbours or something.

after it all evaps, you will probably be left with some oily red goo.. redissolve this in pure alcohol or acetone at least once and let evap again to help getting rid of traces of xylene. The final product should eventually be waxy, after redissolving and rescrapping it on the evapping dish a few times.
 
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I'm looking forward to a layman's chemical answer to the above question. My instinct says that the acetone is anhydrous and at some point (must be more than h20) it cannot dissolve certain things. I wonder if anhydrous acetone can dissolve other (I assume water) - chemists help me out. My guess ,as one new to this forum, is that the solvent does not need to be warmed and that one would likely need to chill the solvent immensely before it could absorb anything..

Looking forward to hearing and learning.
 
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damiana said:
does anyone know if the xylene should be warmed up for better yields for this xylene fasa tek. or does that only apply to naphtha?
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Warming the xylene is not really necessary, because xylene is a really good solvent for spices - People warm the the naphtha because it is a poor solvent for various spices.

Warmer solvents in general tend to make it easier for things to dissolve in them.
 
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halcyon said:
I'm looking forward to a layman's chemical answer to the above question. a) My instinct says that the acetone is anhydrous and b) at some point (must be more than h20) it cannot dissolve certain things. I wonder if anhydrous acetone can dissolve other (I assume water) - chemists help me out. c) My guess ,as one new to this forum, is that the solvent does not need to be warmed and that one would likely need to chill the solvent immensely before it could absorb anything..

Looking forward to hearing and learning.
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So,

a) acetone is not inherently anhydrous; it mixes nicely with water, unlike xylene or naphtha. Acetone also mixes nicely with other solvents, like xylene and naphtha. Acetone however does not mix very nicely with water that has a high ionic strength (i.e. water that has loads of salts dissolved in it)

b)acetone can dissolve some things and cannot dissolve other things. It can dissolve freebased spices but not their fumarate salts. Water-laden acetone however (such as 5% water in the acetone) will be able to dissolve a good amount of things that are insoluble in acetone but soluble in water.

c) After 3 hours pondering at the sentence, SWIM's friend of a friend still has difficulty understanding what the poet really means...:)
 
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the fact that acetone does not mix with salt-saturated water.. couldnt one theoretically make some dmt extraction using this property? Is there a way to for example freebase dmt in an acqueous solution, saturate solution with salt but keep the freebase as freebase without it getting the ions from the dissolved salt and becoming a salt itself?

another thing.. if acetone mixes with water, and also with non-polar solvents such as naphtha, but naphtha doesnt mix with water.. then what happens if you mix the 3? Will all of it mix, acetone will stay with water and naphtha above, or acetone with naphtha and water will stay below, or acetone will divide itself and be a bit in each?
 
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endlessness said:
the fact that acetone does not mix with salt-saturated water.. couldnt one theoretically make some dmt extraction using this property? Is there a way to for example freebase dmt in an acqueous solution, saturate solution with salt but keep the freebase as freebase without it getting the ions from the dissolved salt and becoming a salt itself?

another thing.. if acetone mixes with water, and also with non-polar solvents such as naphtha, but naphtha doesnt mix with water.. then what happens if you mix the 3? Will all of it mix, acetone will stay with water and naphtha above, or acetone with naphtha and water will stay below, or acetone will divide itself and be a bit in each?
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If one gets (just an example) a 50% acetone 50%water solution and dissolves a good amount of salt in it, two phases will separate. The upper is going to be acetone and the lower water, but that is not quite right. Actually the upper phase will be mostly acetone with some water and a bit of salt, and the lower phase is going to be mosttly the salty water with some acetone in it.

SIWM's FOAF has not found a good way of using acetone instead of naphtha or xylene...One could indeed pull with acetone from a super-salt saturated basic solution, then what? The pulled acetone will have some water in it, the base, maybe some salt, loads of fats and the freebased spices. How one can proceed from this step onwards? Maybe if all the acetone evaporates (and only water is left) the spices and a fair amount of lipids may precipitate out? SIWM's FOAF does not really know, he's never done that

Re to the second issue, in a mixture of water, NP splvent and acetone, acetone will be both in water and the NP sollvent. the XlogP3 of acetone is -0.1 . This means that if one takes a mixture of 50% water and 50% octane (a NP solvent, that does not mix with water) and adds, say 10ml of acetone in it, then (roughly) 4.5ml of acetone will find refuge in the octane, and the rest 5.5 will be in the water.

That is, if one adds 100ml of acetone in this mixture, 45ml will be in the octane fraction and the rest 55ml will be dissolved in water.

Hope that helps!
 
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very good info, thanks a lot!

SWIM cannot find limonene and would like to see if he can use other non-petrochemical products in a friendlier extraction, so was just checking the possibilities. But indeed seems a bit tricky, too much loss involved.

btw, does anybody know the pka of jungle spice, compared to dmt? Maybe jungle spice is a mixture of alkaloids/plant oils, but if the pkas are distinct, then maybe one could even get pure dmt with xylene pulls, considering enough defat was done, right? Like, make 'fractional' pulls with small ph increments and see how much one could separate the alkaloids by their pka.

I guess nobody did much tests in this area though.
 
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