Is heptane any better than hexane as a non-polar solvent for extracting spice from mhrb?

Hexane is beta for re-x of DMT

Thanks, but what about extraction from basified aqueous solution?

Does it have a better/worse distribution coefficient than heptane? Is it more selective?

I use heptane for extraction. Works fine. Just need to heat things up a little. 40°c or so.

Where swim lives Hexane is much cheaper, so she would like to know if there is a good reason to pay 2-3 times more for Heptane.

Actually Hexane seems to have an advantage. Its boiling point is 69C (for n-Hexane), while that of n-Heptane is 98.4C.

OTOH, Wikipedia says that Heptane is a totally non-polar solvent. About Hexane it says: Hexanes are widely used as cheap, relatively safe, largely unreactive, and easily evaporated non-polar solvents. Is it less "totally non-polar" ?

As a non-chemist swim doesn't see much difference.

I was always under the influence that heptane made preeeeeeeetttttyyyy glass shardy crystals when slow evapped. Other than that I always also thought it was just up to whoever was using it, whatever solvent they wanted.

Can you explain why?

The only possible explanation for that would have been a bigger difference in spice solubility between higher and lower temps for hexane than for heptane. Swim does not know of that. Therefore this kemist's statement remains not substantiated.

Yeah, I always figured heptane was better for Re-x's as the slow evap allows for solid formations.

Don't you think it is somewhat unscientific approach? It seems to be a simple question that has a simple answer.

what do you want to know?
both are straight-chained aliphatic hydrocarbons, immiscible in water (polarity index = 0), and Van Der Waals forces are the only interactions these molecules have, since they have no dipole moment. obviously, boiling point will increase with increasing length.

there is no specificity as far as what hexane or heptane will pull, both will pull the same compounds.

VM&P contains both, as well as octane and nonane. may as well save the Bestine for re-x
better yet, get some methylene chloride. its toxicity is often exaggerated, but its ability to pull alks trumps all other solvents (except the more toxic chloroform).

I have been playing with the light end of the alkane spectrum for extractions using 35/60 petroleum ether. It is a mix of primarily pentane and hexane with a boiling point in the 35 to 60 deg C range. It is pretty volatile for warmed (30 deg C) extractions, and I have had to be very careful to properly vent my separation funnel during extractions. High vapor pressure at near room temperature is a characteristic that I do not like about this PE.

After combining all pulls I distilled 140 ml down to 35 ml to concentrate the spice in solution and recover some of my PE. Then I freeze precipitated the 35 ml concentrate. The beauty of these light ends is that a freeze precipitation is thoroughly done in my experiments after two hours at -25 deg in my meat freezer. After pouring off the solvent, I evaporated it and found very little spice. It was a slight haze on the glass bowl... no significant crystals. The crystals in the dish that were freeze precipitated weighed in at 0.5 grams. The volume of the solvent was approximately 35 ml in this test. The result of an overnight freeze precipitation was identical.

I am going to try using distilled Bestine... and distilled VM&P in the future for extractions just to compare the results with that I have seen with 35/60 PE.

Any thoughts?

yeah..

so spice is marginally soluble in the light aliphatics such as hexane and heptane, and thus it stands to reason that heating the solvent would be necessary to get DMT to go into solution. obviously, you won't be able to take the temp very high for solvents like pet ether, which is why those solvents (hexanes/pet ether) should be reserved for recrystallization. heptane is acceptable as an extraction solvent, but VM&P is probably better.

ILPT is terribly sorry. He thought, that SWIM asking about crystalization of dmt no about pulling solvent.

For extracting neither of them !!! (unless one can not get any other solvent at desired purity)

They are always other interesting alkaloids in plants beside DMT and it would be shame to avoid them in swim`s extract by using these highly DMT selective solvents. It also involves heating, which is not economical.

ILPT would rather use, stabilized diethyether (he still thinking how would terc. buthylether work), dichlormethane(maybe even tetrachlormethane), or aromatics like toluene (but not xylene), also natural terpene limonene (never tried , but will do)

For re-x he prefer hexane, because he seen it in some papers when this solvent was used for re-x of synthetic freebase DMT as as part of purification process.

Also it has lower boiling point then heptane That`s always good thing


Anyway he has to use heptane nowadays as he cannot get hexane as pure as his heptane . It doesn`t really matter. One need to always go for purest stuff he can get , but if there will be choice btw. pure hexane and pure heptane at the same price, ILPT would go for hexane !!!

Thanks a lot. That is what swim was looking for.

A friend was planning on obtaining hexane or heptane from a lab as naphtha a little hard to come by, at least cost-effectively, in the UK.

He was planning on using the 'rootbark to smokeable in roughly 3-4 hours' tek: Tek to be used

with the addition of a hot water bath to help things along.

So after reading this is hexane not a great option (hexane half the price of heptane) due to the low boiling point?

Hexane will be fine if you can't find naptha. Kemist was saying he prefers to use a solvent that is not so alkaloid specific. Hexane will pull out the DMT, and will do it quite nicely -- you just won't get the full spectrum of goodies that Xylene/Limo will pull.

From my understanding, naptha will pull more than Hexane because of its mix of solvents, but not as much as Xylene/Limo.
I haven't done anything with Hexane except for recrystallization, but I'm sure for your initial alkaloid extracation it will give you some nice white crystals to 'ooo' and 'ahh' at.

this hexane vs. heptane talk is misleading.
neither is better than the other because they have identical polarity index values.
there's no advantage to using one over the other.

also, there is no alkaloid specific solvent, i don't know who started this myth. in separation science, binary solvent mixtures are typically used, varying the composition over time. this is run against a stationary solid phase. sometimes more than two solvents are used, even then, the mixture is not alkaloid-specific.

Thanks for the info, benz.

I don't think I'm using the phrase 'alkaloid specific' in the way you're thinking.. as in "hexane is used specifically for DMT".
I use it more in the sense of the solvents ability to pull a certain spectrum of alkaloids. Xylene/Limo has a wider spectrum, naptha a narrower spectrum, hexane/heptane even narrower.

I was not aware that they have identical polarity.

now see, this is when miscibility is a factor.
limonene and xylene are slightly miscible with water, so those solvents will pull a bit of the water soluble compounds (whatever is in the basic aqueous phase). completely nonpolar solvents like hexane and heptane will not. better overall yields are observed with the former solvents, as the latter are not very efficient for extraction. they're more appropriate for crystallization.