Isolating CBD's and THC's using condensed vapour from a Volcano?

[bit_pattern]

We all know that the residue that builds up in vap bags and in the valve systems is a high grade of oil and that if you condense the vapour then you should have a relatively inefficient way of extracting oils.

My idea though is to use different temperatures. You could set the vap initially at 180 C. and extract the THC spectrum, collect the oil, then heat up the same herb sample at incrementally higher temperatures, each time collecting the oil. If you have herbs with high CBD concentrations (White Rhino etc) then at the higher temps, once you've already vaporised the THC's at lower temperatures, should allow you to collect pure CBD oils.

I noticed that when re-vaping high CBD herbs at 230 C. gave a much more pleasant high than what I get at 180 C. and got to thinking about how I could smoke CBD's all the time.

So my idea at this stage is to coil a large length of rubber hose (something that won't react with a solvent like butane), and fill it with vapor, then condense the vapor by spraying the outside of the hose with some form of aerosol. Once it has condensed in the hose then I could pump butane through it, catch the butane in a pyrex dish and evaporate over a bath of hot water.

Has anyone tried doing this? Does anyone have any thoughts on the practicalities of the idea?

I know that it is an inefficient way to get oil in general but could be an incredibly cheap and easy way of isolating particular compounds.

 

[sekio]

This is called gas chromatography. Look it up.

A Volcano or whatever is going to have very crude temperature control. A Soxhlet extractor is a better bet for THC extraction.

 

[bit_pattern]

This is called gas chromatography. Look it up.

A Volcano or whatever is going to have very crude temperature control. A Soxhlet extractor is a better bet for THC extraction.

Yeah but I don't have one of those. I do have a Volcano though.

*EDIT*

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L6MDOW88zc

Yeah, but nah, I don't want to turn my house into a lab, I just want to smoke some CBD oil. And apparently the Volcano digital has a to within 1.5 C. accuracy, which is fine for my purposes.

 

[TheAzo]

This is called gas chromatography. Look it up.

A Volcano or whatever is going to have very crude temperature control. A Soxhlet extractor is a better bet for THC extraction.

No, it's called fractional distillation...

A soxhlet extractor will not achieve what the OP sought to do, which was to separate between the various cannabinoids. I don't think there are any nice solubility properties to exploit to separate them - so we're stuck with distillation or other, less practical methods.


On the idea:

Concept is sound, but your proposed method to condense the vapor is impractical.

First, vaporizers (unfortunately) mix a lot of air with the vapor, so you can't condense all of it - so you want to try to condense as much of it as possible. What I would attempt to do is to collect the vapor in some sort of condenser, instead of the bag that it normally goes into. You honestly might be able to get away with a simple, straight tube (i'd use one maybe 1/2 inch in diameter, glass if I could get it). If the outside of the tube doesn't get warm in use, you won't get much benefit by applying external cooling. IIRC, the flow rate is relatively slow, so if we're using a tube a few feet long, most of the vapors will probably condense (a glass tube would make assessing this easier, as you could see the oil that condensed on the inside). Run the vape, then to collect the product, rinse the tube with acetone - no need to get fancy with butane; we only use butane for extractions because it's highly selective for cannabinoids vs other crap in the plant. Since we've already separated the part we want, we don't care about selectivity, and can use what's cheapest and easiest to work with - acetone, which is also safer by far. Evaporate the acetone (no, don't apply heat, just let it sit and evaporate), and there's your product...

You can of course get fancy with the condenser, but i'm not sure how much it would gain you, and a more complicated geometry would make it harder to wash out all of the product at the end.

This is actually a rather interesting idea... I might try something like this myself, if I ever cost justify buying a temperature controlled vape (which IMO solves the hard part of fractionally distilling cannabinoids out of cannabis).

It's likely something that will require some trial and error to get consistnt results, but it might be rewarding.

 

[nAON]

Now i don't know much about this sort of stuff.. but instead of a tube, would it work to instead put something like a cloth, sponge, tissue etc., through which the vapours are forced through? If it's thick enough, most shouldn't escape. Then to extract, just dunk it all in some iso or acetone and let it extract out from that.

 

[Epsilon Alpha]

I knew a guy back in high school that did something similar to this, he had a very precisely controlled heating element he got online (if memory serves it was from some sort of industrial sized oven), and hooked up a DIY copper pipe condenser in a icebath to it. He would rinse out the copper pipe with everclear when he wanted to get his oil, and then run a few more runs on that when he got enough.

From what I recall you had to start a few degrees below the vape temp and leave it there for a longer time than anyone would consider needed for the best results. We also experimented with making a rough iso extraction beforehand and and got our best results though it took so freaking long.

 

[skillet]

^ Haha, sounds fun :D

It's an interesting idea, and I'd love to be able to separate THC and CBD from all the other stuff, and try them alone and in combinations, but I don't think it'll work very well like that. It's not even fractional distillation, since you're way below the boiling point of either compound (155-157 C @ 0.05 torr for THC, 179-183 C @ 0.08 torr for CBD). You'd just be evaporating the stuff in a stream of air below its boiling point, so I guess the vapour pressure of each compound would be more important, and I've no idea what they are. Though I'd expect THC to have a higher vapour pressure than CBD, for the same reason (probably) it has a lower boiling point.

I wouldn't think you'd get much, if any, separation like that, but if you notice a difference maybe it does work to an extent.

 

[Epsilon Alpha]

@skillet:

When I tried it back in highschool we managed to get some interesting results as far as subjective effects, even when we'd not tell each other what we were sampling the lower temperature fractions produced a really short lived mindfucky high and the very high temperature fraction was couch-lock and body high if you were stoned yet no effect if you smoked it sober. Interestingly enough we would always get this one weird fraction at about 166 C which was downright psychadelic.

If you've got a spare 2 hours and the equipment it's definitely worth experimenting on.

 

[skillet]

A weird psychedelic fraction is interesting :D It wasn't just like a pure THC or JWH kinda psychedelic then?

 

[Epsilon Alpha]

A weird psychedelic fraction is interesting :D It wasn't just like a pure THC or JWH kinda psychedelic then?

Kind of like mushrooms but far more angular and mellow, it lasted around 20 minutes and everything "just went ninja stars... ninja stars man".
I swear I must have said that last bit 5 or 6 times, its kind of like that really awesome just smoked THC vibe but it had the whole alien feeling of shrooms.

Just became a normal energetic bake after 20 minutes though. But yeah, I had a group of IB stoners back in the day
I think it might have been heavy in one of the more obscure cannibinoids since it had such a distinct feel and that they bind to so many other receptors.