this is an excellent youtube vid http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfLPQ-29Iw

recommend a lighter then water steam distillation apparatus. easy to work with.

would really like a SFE. man, they crank out pure product in 20 mins or less.

bees have been interested in the steam distillation technique for a long time

its lots of fun but to get large amounts of like limonene or something like few hundred ml's is going to take aaaaaaalot of orange peels. plus natural essential oils are made of many compounds and could interfere with their use as solvent..

ah by SFE you meant supercritical fluid extraction? yes its a great way to extract fatty compounds like essential oils.

its funny though sometimes companies who use supercritical carbon dioxide act like oh look we are finding an environmentally friendly way to use carbon dioxide to extract natural compounds. but all the carbon dioxide they use is made artificially anyway.

just out of interest, whats lemonene used for?

a wide variety of things.. for starters, it's a suitable substitute for many aromatic non-polar solvents as well as chlorocarbons; used for heat transfer, degreasing, sanitizing, flavor additive, and polystyrene recycling.

so, technically one could extract from MHRB with this? Is it superior to naptha / colemans fuel / Xylene?

also, how quickly does it evaporate relative to these?

I wouldn't say it superior, just easier on your health and less flammable. it doesn't evaporate easily, for that reason, many people will stick to naptha, which (aside from considerable flammability) isn't very dangerous anyway. it's really a matter of preference and discretion: some people are paranoid about the smell of chemicals, and limonene has a most agreeable odor that wouldn't alarm anyone.

where can one obtain it from?

its legal to buy can probably find it on the web as some natural alternative for something. you could also distill it from lemons and oranges but thats a lot of work and a lot of distilling and it wont be pure.

spice freebase is freely soluble in it. evaporating it away is the hard part. i believe a way around this has been worked out however check out limonene tek thread.

ah see, swim is on the search for a better-than-naptha solvent, i.e Lighter than naptha. Thought about using something like butane gas, bubbled through solution... but... unlikely.

hexane is ideal, though typically used for recrystallization. it's lighter than water, has low toxicity, and evaporates very easily

and where swim get this... hexane.

also; its not going to set off any alarm bells is it?

yeah swim just called me and said he can't find it on google because there is only one supplier and they only sell to labs.

i think oderless mineral spirits is 99% hexane. let me check according to wiki:

"A typical composition for mineral spirits is the following: aliphatic solvent hexane having a maximum aromatic hydrocarbon content of 0.1% by volume, a kauri-butanol value of 29, an initial boiling point of 149 °F (65 °C), a dry point of approximately 156 °F (69 °C), and a specific mass of 0.7 g/cc. In the European Community, the composition of mineral spirits comes from Article 11(2) of Directive 2002/96/EC (WEEE)."

so its mostly hexane. the thing with naptha is it contains many aromatic hydrocarbons like toluene probably benzene which are a bit tougher to evaporate and more toxic. its a substitute for turpentine so painters can feel better about the solvents they are inhaling its available all over.

so, how come it took so god damn long for swim's oderless mineral spirits to evaporate ~ 62*C - it should have been practically boiling? + FAN on max, it should have gone within an hour or so.

swim thinks his turp substitute isn't odourless.

this goes in the eco-forum.

this existed before the eco-forum