Detail about the Ethanol and their Extraction process:

Posted by Ainsley Aiken on October 9th, 2019

What Is Ethanol?

Ethanol is a chemical compound of a colorless volatile flammable liquid (C ₂H ₆O) that is the intoxicating agent in liquors and is also used as a solvent and in fuel—called also ethyl alcohol. The main source of extracting the ethanol is starch of corn, wheat, grain sorghum, barley, and potatoes, and from sugar crops such as sugar cane and sweet sorghum. Because there has been an abundant supply of corn, most of the ethanol made in the United States is from corn,” the University of Illinois Extension explains.

Why ethanol used for extraction?

Polar solvents are frequently used for recovering polyphenols from plant matrices. The most suitable solvents are aqueous mixtures containing ethanol, methanol, acetone, and ethyl acetate. Ethanol has been known as a good solvent for polyphenol extraction and is safe for human consumption.

The Process of Ethanol Extraction:

A single-stream process that can be conducted under warm or cold conditions is called the extraction process of Ethanol. The method for extracting the ethanol is while heating the ethanol can increase the extraction efficiency and relatively low solvent-to-feed ratio. However, the warm-ethanol technique is a very efficient approach that extracts chlorophyll/waxes and decarboxylases due to the heat involved. (Decarboxylation is the conversion of THCA, for example, to THC through heating and agitation that yields carbon dioxide during the process.) Therefore, heated ethanol extractions might require additional dewaxing and clarification steps. To make these products, generally you need to have an initial extract purity that is higher than 80%, especially in cases of certain crystalline, and also in cases of othercrystalline scenarios.

This type of technique is also limited in the number of products it can produce because all the acid-form compounds are decarboxylase during the extraction. For extracting terpenes and compounds the ethanol is the good source of extraction. Therefore, it can be used as an extraction solvent at room temperature or under supercoiled conditions. Using ethanol at room temperature or under cooling conditions are the most common practices because these conditions allow for the retention of compund acid forms that can be leveraged to manufacture shatters.

Scaling for Ethanol Extraction:

To recover that volume of alcohol, the laboratory would require a large rotary or falling film evaporator (equipment made to gently remove solvents from samples by evaporation). For this example, the most cost-effective choice is to rotary evaporator, probably. It can carry 16 liters/hour evaporator would recover the ethanol in about five and a half hours, which means that there would still be room for additional throughput on the extraction side; roughly, 17 to 18 pounds of additional feed material throughput per day is feasible.

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