Mr. Soxhlet
This guy right here invented a soxhlet extraction tube. The extraction tube is used to extract lipids! The oil that you have laying in the kitchen, (NOT VIRGIN OIL) is most likely extracted from a plant based on this (like corn or sunflower to make oil such as sunflower oil).
In lab, we got to use a soxhlet extraction tube. It works like this:
So basically, in the picture below, #1 (yellow circle) is where you put the solid in. In this case, we put in vanilla wafers. #2 (blue circle) is where the fat goes after being extracted. It’s also where our solvent (petroleum ether) is. For this machine to work, you need to put a solvent in the flask. The solvent will boil and its vapor will condense the material inside number 1. In other words, this extracts the crude fat out of the solid. So, it’s not as pure.
The point where I want to get to is, virgin oil is made by compression so it’s more purified. They don’t make virgin oil in this extractor. This method is probably used more for the other types of oil like canola oil because of extracting crude fat (crude - raw). So tomorrow, we’re going to go back into lab to see how much fat we have in our vanilla wafers haha. Just a cool little gadget we used in lab and wanted to share.
Pics are from wikipedia except my raw pic of the machines. You probably would have to click my link to see a better layout of this. It looks funny on the dashboard.
