I've got a ton of emulsion, it looks like just one layer.
Using sodium carbonate as the base and extracting with naphta.
The extract itself is a a/b extract with very little plant material in it, 90% water. I also basified it thoroughly, until the carbonate clumped up at the bottom and I filtered that out.
The initial ratio of the solution extract:naphta was 5:1.
I shook that up and it caused a large emulsion, I'd say the bottom half of the bottle is now water and the top half is this foamy substance. It's like the naphta and the water are mixed somehow.
So, I tried the following in order:

Added some plain salt;
I've let it sit for a few days;
Added a LOT of salt, the bottom 1.5/5 of the jar was covered in salt;
Gave it a 15 min heat bath while taking the foam with a pipette and pumping it through the bottom;
Added enough water to eliminate any congestion problems;
Added more sodium carbonate (which is pretty unnecessary);
Added naphta to try and see if the foam separated;

And that's it. The only thing that I know and I haven't tried is vibrating it, but I have nothing that would do the trick.

Can anyone shed some light on this, please? It's really frustrating

Edit: Following this thread, I've decided to take some of the foam and dry it out, see if it is oxidized dmt:
https://www.dmt-nexus.me...spx?g=posts&t=24992.

He is experiencing the same issue using the same base. My emulsion does indeed look like foam. His thread has no solution, however, so answers are still needed.

Just try tapping around the neck of bottle or around the top of jar ..give it a heat bath then let it sit overnight is should be setteled by morning...

Did you read the post? I'm not gonna tell you what's wrong with your reply, read past the title man.

Lol.

As far as i can say, i think your issue might be that you are using sodium carbonate. You should consider getting another base if you want to do a standard STB for DMT. Soda carb is good for dry teks, but not for wet teks. the pH doesnt get high enough to eliminate emulsion like lye does.

My suggestion for you at the moment is to siphon off the emulsion and the naptha and put them into a seperate container, add hot salt saturated water to it and gently swirl it like a wine glass. Thats the only thing i can think of that might help you. Also, you might try putting it in the fridge over night. see if that helps. some people say cold temps help eliminate emulsion, i dont believe it, but you can try.

I'm doing an A/B extraction, not STB.

I can't siphon off the naphta because it is mixed into the foam. When I tried siphoning off all the foam, it got to a point where the foam just became more and more dense (wetter), making it impossible to get a single layer.

You dont need a single layer right now. Thats the problem, emulsion is mixing your layers. lol. Thats why i said take the naptha and the emulsion/foam and put it into a seperate container and add more water to that. it should do well to break it up.

soda carb is your problem though.

I'll try adding water to the naphta itself, I haven't done that yet.
Why is sodium carb a problem?

Based on your previous post, what do you mean by dry and wet tek?

If its been thoroughly filtered then sodium carbonate should be ok to use, unless too much has now been used and its crystallizing absorbing the liquid and turning to mush..
Try splitting the extraction now as du57 said, maybe into 3 jars and add more water to each, warm and let settle then test pH is high enough. A tablespoon of lye in each wouldnt harm either.
Add a bit of fresh naptha and roll the jar and rotate end on end then stir rather than shaking the life out of it.

a dry tek uses a sodium carbonate paste rather than a giant jar of liquid(wet).

sodium carbonate is the problem cuz its not a strong enough base to destroy the tannins that cause emulsions to form.

if you have access to lye, do what DreaMTripper suggested.

What you want to start doing at this point is seperating out the emulsion as best as possible. So first things first, siphon off all the emulsion and naptha and put that into a seperate jar. once you have that you should add some fairly hot salty water. by adding that straight to the naptha/emulsion it should break down alot of the emulsion by making it thinner, by making the solution ionically stronger, and by heating it up. This should cause them all to seperate better. If you can, slowly start siphoning off the naptha that doesnt have emulsion so that you can eventually have a semi-recoverable amount of naptha to get alkaloids from, just in case you get frustrated with it and decide to scratch the whole project atleast youll have something to show for it. I actually wouldnt even suggest rotating it end over end, you can if you want, see if it helps. IME, it just made things worse.

also, in future extractions, i would suggest reusing naptha. I am the type that likes to vigorously shake my jars like a mad man. Doing so obviously causes massive emulsion layers to form, but what Ive learned is that naptha that is saturated with plant oils makes emulsions seperate 10x faster than clean naptha. If i were to use clean naptha in my teks, i would have to let my jars sit 24-72 hours after every shake. But since i use reused naptha that has plant oils in it, the emulsion settles in 10-20mins, faster when heat is added.

Can I just add lye to the emulsified solution?

Do it but dissolve Lye in water first, from what I've read you have a ton of salt and sodium carbonate already saturating your water.

Ok, I'm gonna give it a shot.

Following up.. Sodium Carbonate is indeed the problem, lye was added and let sit for a day, which cleared the foam up.

I'm surprised that so many teks are partial to sodium carbonate, it didn't work at all for me even with careful execution.

Hate to say i told ya so. but you gotta learn somehow. Like i said before, soda carb is great in dry teks, and teks that have completely strained out the plant matter. Also if you dont shake it up, but instead just roll your jar end over end then emulsion can be slightly prevented. But also if you consider how much less lye you used in comparison to an all lye tek, id say it was beneficial in some ways.

Stoopid emulsion... swim has a fish filter/pump that vibrates. Attaches that to the bottles and allow it to vibrate the mix until it's siphonable then filter it.

Another, if it's not too emulsified like in your case, is to siphon it all and put it in the freezer as if going to precip, let it freeze for 12 hours, drain off the nap then after you fan dry(to get excess nap so it doesn't mix) dissolve in acetone and filter thru a coffee filter. Let the acetone evaporate, put warm naph in the oil and let it sit in a warm bath @40-50c(not F), hen either pipe off the naph if it's clean or filter again then put it in the freezer. Crap option but it works...
Alternatively you can put some leaf in the acetone mix before allowing to evaporate and make changa. Ratio is hard to guage.

Vibration for a good 40 mins to an hour... or until you're happy