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Solvent free microwave extraction

Solvent-free microwave extraction is a combination of microwave heating and dry distillation at atmospheric pressure in which the essential oil is isolated in a single step, no solvent or water.

SFME is most efficient in plant material with high water content.

I can't find any evidence of this method being used for cannabis but it's fast and scalable and could easily replace rosin extraction IMO. Thoughts?
 

montroller

Member
I remember everyone talking about this before we really knew what clear was. There was a thread about it on reddit a few years ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CannabisEx..._rapid_solventfree_microwave_extraction_sfme/

and another one on ICmag

https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=283274

emeraldcitydog said:
I didn't have time to try any other variations, but I ordered it and used it a few hours ago.
I put a decent ounce of dried buds in there, nuked it for 6 minutes and absolutely nothing distinguishable as oil was in the water! I used the the separating flask and everything but it literally is water. Not even a scent or a tint. I let it sit and condense before opening the door and followed all their instructions.

I didn't smell much herb coming out of the microwave either, so I'm a bit puzzled as to why. It would seem that it needs to be nuked longer but the ice core is gone after 6 minutes, so perhaps letting it condense for a few minutes and giving it another go with another core would help.

I'm not too concerned about it and I'll be trying a few more things before moving on to oranges etc. Perhaps fresher, damp herb would work better with the internal water content. Mine was pretty dry. Either way, preliminary tests don't look promising whatsoever. At least from a production standpoint.

Sorry guys.
 

G.O. Joe

Active member
Veteran
There are Harborside threads here where the Milestone units were discussed in hush hush secret whispers by some.

All of that went nowhere. Buy and load up your microwave reactor with fresh greasy buds and let us know how it goes?

My as usual DOA suggestion was hot air pressure instead of just gravity.
 

Rickys bong

Member
Veteran
For extracting resin this won't work without vacuum. Even with high vacuum I doubt the difficulties of temperature distribution throughout the plant mass and degradation could be controlled. It might work for terpenes, but not at atmosphere...

RB
 
A microwave will only heat up the polar compounds. The non-polar terpenes and cannabinoids would not be distilled with microwave. There might be some that get carried away with the water or air but in general the non-polars would stay in the boiling flask while the polar compounds would be distilled away. Very efficient for heating water, but not for oils.
 

PDX Dopesmoker

Active member
A microwave will only heat up the polar compounds. The non-polar terpenes and cannabinoids would not be distilled with microwave. There might be some that get carried away with the water or air but in general the non-polars would stay in the boiling flask while the polar compounds would be distilled away. Very efficient for heating water, but not for oils.

I wonder if anyone makes a tunable microwave oven so someone can figure out what the primo frequency range is for extracting plant resins. I looked into the topic of microwave heating of non-polar molecules a little and found this graph of peroxide values in microwave heated vegetable oils that made me wonder if the microwave might convert THC to COOH.
image527.gif
 
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