What is Ethanol?
Ethanol is a commonly used fuel, solvent and disinfectant and is also used to make other compounds. Industrial alcohol contains a small amount of methanol, and medical alcohol is ethanol with a concentration of about 75%. It is commonly used in the preparation of traditional Chinese medicine and tanning agents. It can also be used in the osmosis method. It can also be used in the dipping method, the dissolution method or the dilution method and extraction methods.
Why Ethanol is a Good Solvent?
Ethanol is a good solvent that dissolves many substances, so ethanol is often used to dissolve plant pigments or medicinal ingredients. For example, ethanol is widely used to extract cbd from hemp plant. Ethanol can be miscible with water in any ratio. What’s more, it can be miscible in most organic solvents such as ether, chloroform, methanol, acetone, glycerin and so on.
What is Ethanol Extraction?
The ethanol extraction method is a method in which ethanol is used as a washing solvent to separate and purify a substance by utilizing the solubility of ethanol. The ethanol extraction is widely used in chemical experiments, chemical purification, chemical pharmaceuticals, preparation of traditional Chinese medicines and so on. There are several ethanol extraction equipment extracting cbd from hemp, for example, centrifuge is one of the most popular ethanol extraction equipment of extracting cbd, which is very effective and energy-saving, because ethanol can be recycled and be used for more times.
Why is Ethanol Used as Solvent for Extraction?
Ethanol is widely used in the plant extraction field. Because ethanol has a very good solubility, which means it can dissolve almost everything. But CO2 doesn’t have that function. And butane is less safe than ethanol and CO2. Therefore, ethanol is a good choice to be used as solvent for extraction. Ethanol has the advantages that CO2 and other solvents do not have, and that’s the reason ethanol is good for it.
As one of the common methods for cannabis extraction, the ethanol extraction really has its own pros, concluded as follows.
Higher Efficiency
Using the ethanol as the washing solvent, it can have a higher efficiency to extract and concentrate substances.
More Purity
With the ethanol washing the material, a purer extracted substance can be gained.
Easy Evaporation
The ethanol can be evaporated efficiently. After washing and extracting the sample materials, the ethanol will be mixed with extracted substances. Therefore, the ethanol and the extracted substances should be separated. With the property of easy evaporation, the ethanol becomes the proper washing solvent.
Complete Extraction
The ethanol can easily and efficiently concentrate nucleic acids (DNA or RNA), which guarantees the pointed substances can be extracted completely.
Which Solvent is Best for Extraction?
Several kinds of substances can be used as the washing solvent for extraction such as, ethanol, CO2, butane and other substances. So which one is the best solvent for extraction? Let’s find out.
Ethanol is the safest solvent, CO2 is less safe than ethanol, and butane is less safe than CO2. What’s more, ethanol can be used for the extraction of more materials than CO2. Therefore, ethanol is the best solvent for extraction.
What are the Solvents Used in Plant Extraction?
Plant extraction is quite popular these days, especially hemp extraction. Generally, there are mainly three kinds of solvents that can be used as washing solvents to extract plant materials out. They are ethanol, CO2, butane.
How Many Distillation Equipment You can Use to Make Distillate?
Distillation equipment is a method that works under a extremely high vacuum environment. A complete set of distillation equipment mainly consists of feeding system, distiller, heating system, condensing system, vacuum system, controlling system and so on. There are several kinds of distillation equipment, for example, rotary evaporator, short path distillation, falling film evaporator, molecular distillation, wiped film evaporator and so on. Next, we will give a detailed explanation about these devices.
- Rotary evaporator is widely used in chemical labs, which consists of rotor, evaporation flask, water oil bath, condensing tubes and other important parts. It is mainly used in the consecutive chemical reactions under reduced pressure. And it is very popular in chemical, industrial, biologic medicine and other fields.
- Short path distillation is a separation method that works under extremely high vacuum environment. It is suitable for heat sensitive, viscous and high boiling point materials, such as petroleum heavy residues, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and natural foods, health products, fatty acids and so on.
- Molecular distillation is a complicated and special liquid-liquid separation method, which is more efficient than traditional separation method. Short path distillation is a type of molecular distillation. The working theory of molecular distillation is to separate substances through molecular free path.
- Falling film evaporator is widely used in medical, food-making, biochemical, light industry and other fields. What’s more, falling film evaporator can also handle with the waste water of above fields.
