How To Choose Extraction Equipment?
When you are ready to purchase a cannabis or hemp oil extraction machine, you should already have answered several important questions.
When you are ready to purchase a cannabis or hemp oil extraction machine, you should already have answered several important questions. The most crucial of these is: have you decided which end product you want to produce, based on market research on the cannabis or hemp products that will be sold on the market today? In addition, you should have fully developed your extraction business plan and be ready to present it to your partners or investors.
The end product required: what do you want to produce? You make an educated guess as to what the market will find attractive.
Audience: who will buy your product and how will they buy it? Through retail pharmacies, online sales or wholesale B2B.
To help you decide which extraction and refining equipment you need to purchase to produce the desired end product of cannabinoid derivatives, let us explore the most commonly used solvent-based and non-solvent-based cannabinoid extraction equipment and techniques.
Multi Cartridge Sanitary Filter
Solvent-based extraction equipment
The use of solvents for cannabinoid extraction has been popular in the contemporary cannabis and hemp industry for many years, if not decades. Solvents are popular for good reason.
Relatively easy to scale up, making them ideal for start-ups with limited budgets but ambitious.
Efficiently produce the most popular cannabis and hemp end products available today.
Relatively safe as long as you comply with local, state and federal laws and guidelines.
The following list of solvent-based vegetable oil extraction equipment and systems summarises the machinery typically required for solvent-based cannabis and cannabinoid extraction, distillation and further refinement.
You may also need a variety of other ancillary equipment, systems and/or machines for your process, so consult an industry expert to ensure you have a complete shopping list of extraction equipment.
Filtration: particulate filters
When you're extracting precious cannabinoids with your ethanol solvent, you need to optimise every part of the process to maximise efficiency and increase profitability. The ability to squeeze your margins can make or break your extraction business.
Using a particulate filter will remove suspended particles and sorbents from the ethanol solution. This means you will be able to re-use the same ethanol for multiple extractions. Cannabinoids can be extracted from multiple bags of biomass, thus reducing production costs.
How does it work?
To extract cannabinoids correctly and efficiently, most processors use cold ethanol for extraction, which requires the rapid cooling of large quantities of ethanol to very low temperatures (see step 1 of the process using the DC-40 direct cooler above).
One of the best ways to optimise this part of the extraction process is to saturate the ethanol solvent with as much cannabinoid as possible to minimise the amount of ethanol that needs to be evaporated later. This saturation is achieved by extracting multiple bags of biomass with the same volume of ethanol in the CUP-15/30.
This is how the lenticular filter skid comes into play. In between the ethanol extraction on the CUP-15/30 machine, the filter skid allows the DC-40 to maintain solvent temperature so that the same solution can be used for up to 3 bags of biomass. The end result is a supersaturated ethanol solution (crude oil) that can be fed into the evaporator.