[Frater EIE]

Greetings
I recently bought myself a soxhlet extractor, except I don't know the first thing about thimbles. There's a whole world of them. Glass  and quartz fiber, cellulite, etc. Very confusing. I have a few ideas of how I wish to use it. First, I plan on trying to extract that oil I once got from potassium carbonate using ethanol (see my other post). So I will be putting potassium carbonate crystals into the thimble and cycling ethanol through the system. Any idea what kind of thimble to use?

Second, I would like to find a way to filter out very finely minced plant matter (pulped in a food processor) from an aqueous solution of potassium carbonate. You think this would be easy, but the extract I am trying to get is very rich in chlorophyll and is readily absorbed in fiber or cloth, like a coffee filter. I tried a plastic mesh screen, but it wasn't fine enough and fine plant particles were left behind in a kind of gelatinous-looking mass. So I need something that won't absorb the chlorophyll extract but fine enough to catch all the tiny plant particulate. I thought maybe a glass fiber filter would work, but have no idea what pore size to use. Any ideas?

Thanks!
Frater EIE

[hypervalent_iodine]

A regular cellulose extraction thimble would do the job for the soxhlet.

No idea with the second issue, sorry. Our lab does a lot of plant extraction, but I don't think we've encountered that issue before. I don't believe that we use water to extract, however. Generally it is just a matter of sitting the mulched plant matter in ethanol for some period of time and filtering, followed by silica column and prep HPLC.