Forced air soxhlet extraction? Could it work?
I want to reduce the running temperature of a soxhlet setup while also not shutting it down. I read another post where another person wanted to hook
their cheap glass up to a vacuum system, but most were concerned the delicate parts and potentially low quality of the glass would cause failure. The
glass of my soxhlet isn't that great, it has bubbles around the joints and it seems sketchy.
Probably dumb question here, but if the air were sucked from the top of the reflux column, heated to >= the solvent temperature, then forced
through the side neck of a 2 neck flask in order to create circulation and encourage the solvent vapor to move in that direction, would the ultimate
temperature needed to run the system be reduced noticeably or would I just be impacting the surface temperature?
I don't know about the physics of evaporation to have a handle on this but my thinking is that if the solvent rich gas phase is forced away from the
surface at a given pressure, than the solvent depleted phase replacing it should actively suck out solvent.
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
― T.S. Eliot
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