CO2 Essential Oil Extraction Equipment

For more than 30 years, we have received many inquiries about CO2 extraction machines, and most of these inquiries are for the extraction of plant essential oils. It makes people feel that as long as people on earth know that CO2 essential oil is one of the optimization essential oils, it seems that an essential oil store without CO2 oil is not a good essential oil seller.
It is true that CO2 essential oil is a good business, and it’s pure, environmentally friendly, and the non-toxic residue is extremely popular. 
So how can you buy the right CO2 oil extractor for you?

3 Tips for Buying a Right CO2 Oil Extractor

Tip 1#: Preparation before buying

At the beginning of the project, the first thing that needs to be determined is the biomass that the plant’s target extract (essential oil) is about to extract, such as hemp. Let’s take marijuana as an example to analyze:

It is well known that the extract of cannabis is CBD, maybe you also need THC, then CBD oil or THC is our target extract. With the target extract, if you have a lot of plants that need to be extracted, you can provide one list of extract plants to us so that based on our 30+ years of experience with extraction experiments, we can determine the maximum extraction pressure required by the machine. Note: The maximum extraction pressure determines the final cost of the CO2 extractor, the higher the pressure, the higher the cost.

The biomass is determined, and then it is confirmed whether it is dry. Generally, we recommend that the moisture content of the biomass needs to be less than 10%. Next, calculate the amount of biomass extracted per day/kg, and what is the essential oil content of the biomass? The higher the essential oil content of the biomass, the longer the extraction time is required.

The working time of the operator is an important factor, which determines the daily extraction batch. For ordinary biomass, we calculate its extraction cycle as 2 hours (including loading and unloading).

Tip 2#: Consultation before buying

With the above preparations, it is now possible to consult the manufacturer of the CO2 essential oil extraction equipment, and only need to provide the following items:

• List of biomass, specific gravity (density) of biomass?
• How many kilograms of biomass need to be processed at most per day.
• How long does the factory work?
• Power supply situation
• The special requirements of the workshop site, are length, width, and height.

With the 5 parameters of the above items, the manufacturer can basically recommend a CO2 Essential Oil Extraction Equipment to you.

Tip 3#: Extractor Group Requirements

The extraction vessel of the extractor has three forms, single vessel, 2 vessels, 3 vessels, 4 vessels, and 6 vessels.
Single extraction vessel configurations are typically used for laboratory or home extraction (small CO2 extraction machines). If we extract a batch of CBD oil for 2 hours, a CO2 extractor with a single-container structure will take at least 3 hours because it requires additional equipment. Loading and unloading process. At the same time, after the extraction process, the CO2 gas in the container must be discharged into the air, which wastes a part of the gas (small CO2 extraction machines are usually not equipped with a CO2 recovery system).
Usually, we recommend customers choose: the double-container or three-container combination, which has high extraction efficiency, gas saving, and low extraction cost compared with a single-vessel combination; 2 vessels or 3 vessels combination for their extraction will be completely complete.

Extraction pressure

High extraction pressure tends to extract some useless substances in the plant together, such as wax and chlorophyll, increasing the cost of post-processing.

Some specific extracts require very high pressure, such as direct extraction of astaxanthin from Haematococcus Pluvialis will require very high pressure, up to 800bar.
In general, the higher the pressure, the more expensive the equipment. You can buy systems at the lower end of the supercritical curve around 350 bar or up to 1050 bar. It is important to note that larger systems become exponentially more expensive as the pressure rating increases. Depending on your extraction technique, a lower pressure system may be sufficient. There are two distinct camps in selection pressure. Some people believe that lower pressure is better because it has less effect on organic compounds, but others believe that higher pressure is better because it destroys cell walls more effectively.

Separator

Once your material is extracted, it is transferred to the separator. Your collection chamber has a big impact on the quality of the extract. The separator is a very important part of the extractor, if you only have one extraction separator, you will not be able to obtain multiple qualities of extracts, the standard configuration is a combination of 2 separators, we recommend the use of tertiary separation (using three separators ). This also allows you to reduce the stress in the system more gradually, which will greatly improve the overall quality.
Under special circumstances, some customers will order the cold trap in the separator, so as to separate the water in the CO2 fluid, and not participate in the next cycle extraction, while increasing the terpene production.

Fractionation system

Supercritical fluid fractionation (SFF) is a method of CO2 extraction, which is used in some specific scenarios, such as countercurrent extraction of capsanthin, or fractionation of ineffective components such as wax and chlorophyll. According to the requirements of the extract, decide whether to equip the distillation system.

Gas recovery

Although our system is a closed-loop extraction system when the gas circulates in the loop, after the extraction process, the double-extractor and triple-extractor combined containers can introduce the gas into the container for preparation, but there is still residual gas in the extraction vessel; at this time, a gas recovery system needs to be used to extract the residual gas in the vessel to be unloaded and introduced into the extraction circuit to save gas.

In some small supercritical co2 extraction machine systems, the gas source is a co2 gas cylinder. Due to the equal ambient temperature and the internal pressure of the machine, the gas cannot be fully used. The gas recovery system has another function, which can extract the gas from the gas cylinder, and used it to improve the efficiency of gas use.

If you don’t mind the cost, equipment above 10L needs to be equipped with a gas recovery system. After all, the price of CO2 gas is not cheap.