A few of the articles from this week's issue of Chemical and Engineering News:
- Fascinating cover story on cannabidiol (by Bethany Halford)
- "[Hebrew University of Jerusalem Professor] Mechoulam isolated half a kilogram of CBD from hashish and sent it to São Paulo, Brazil"
- that must have been interesting...
- Profile of the European X-ray Free-Electron Laser, the "the biggest, brightest X-ray source on the planet." (article by Mark Peplow)
- GoPros on chemists (article by Kerri Jansen)
- good luck reproducing that one
- C&EN's write-up of the latest industrial chemical accident in China (article by Jean-François Tremblay)
- the article doesn't say what the chemical was - I wonder if it was really methanol?
- ACS President Peter Dorhout on his safety-oriented initiative
I have seen a pilot process setup in Europe where they were extracting CBD on kilo scale. I imagined a sophisticated supercritical CO2 apparatus. Instead, it was self-made steel kettle extractors using good old iPrOH. One does not have to be too gentle - in fact CBD isolation requires heating to something like 120-130C to decarboxylate its precursor CBD-carboxylic acid. The key part of the process is highvac distillation on spinning band columns, and there is a re-crystallization of the distilled CBD at the end.
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