As the cannabis industry continues to grow, it places a higher demand on producers and processing facilities to meet the increasing mandate for clean, refined cannabis-based products. While there are several commercialized solutions for solvent removal, concentration, and distillation at the lab and proof-of-principle scales, very few strategies exist for handling the amounts of solvent required to process cannabis at the industrial scale. This talk will review the current state of cannabis processing technology and where current processing bottlenecks exist. Strategies for scaling several evaporation technologies including wiped film (falling or rising film), rotary evaporation, and short path distillation will be discussed, as well as where each process fits in the cannabis processing workflow. Finally, recommendations will be given for a complete industrial scale cannabis processing workflow from handling of biomass, ethanol generation and extraction, extract concentration, and isolate purification.
Learning Objectives:
1. Be able to identify or describe three different industrial scale evaporation/concentration techniques, and will know where each technique fits in the cannabis processing workflow
2. Have a general working understanding of technologies used at the industrial scale, for processing cannabis biomass into concentrate for product introduction