Get ALL your Cannabinoids: Vacuum Vaporization

Vaporizers do not extract ALL the cannabinoids from cannabis. This is evident to anyone who has ever used ABV to get high. In addition to not being 100% efficient, there are simply some cannabinoids whose boiling point is past the point of combustion.

How can we improve the efficiency of vaporizers? And how can we extract the high boiling point cannabinoids?

Well, if you remember from a basic chemistry course, boiling points are dependent on the pressure a given substance is exposed to. Water boils at a lower temperature on the top of mountains than it does at sea level.

In laboratories when we need to remove solvents or by-products and our target compound is sensitive to heat, sometimes we use a vacuum chamber to remove solvents and byproducts. We lower the pressure way down to around .01 Torr (For reference, normal atmospheric pressure is 760 Torr or 101.3kPa or 1atm haha too many) and the solvents just boil right off. We can apply heat as well if we want to encourage some larger molecules to boil off.

Now, in the lab when we boil off compounds we don't save what boils off, it gets whisked away by the vacuum pump.

So the challenge is building a vacuum chamber vaporizer. How can this be designed? Does anyone have any ideas? This is certainly feasible (although expensive).

If this can be done we could produce true medical grade vaporizers. A vaporizer that is extremely efficient and gets all the cannabinoids. This would be a huge hit with medical patients around the world, and with the recreational market.

So start brainstorming!

Hey, you should post this on Fuck Combustion - Vaporizer Forum

Some inventors watch that site, and even record progress on Vapes they are building.

nornerator, you're on the right track.
Given that combustion is what we would prefer to avoid then finding an innovative device, (modified vaporizer or a new process entirely), is likely the next step.

Sure we can crank some Vaporizers up to the point of combustion and take advantage of the 66 or so cannabinoids that cannabis makes available synergistically in that form but as it stands now we are cast in something of a no mans land choosing between combustion on one hand and vaporization on the other. Yes, we can ingest but that brings up another set of issues for many people.

Now that we've reached a significant milestone/plateau in the legitimization of cannabis I expect we'll start to see an incredible array of new and exciting findings and their resulting innovations which will unlock the door to a whole new level of medical solutions...


"In contrast to the incomplete state of the science regarding use of the plant itself, the identity, pharmacology, and clinical effects of several of marijuana's constituents are relatively well characterized.

Marijuana contains more than 60 distinct cannabinoids, of which a series of tetrahydrocannabinols (THC) and their metabolites are the primary psychoactive ingredients and best-known components.
Δ9-THC alleviates the nausea associated with cancer chemotherapy and AIDS wasting ........
Even the nonpsychoactive cannabinoids have been shown to have cellular and physiologic effects that could prove of clinical value."*


*Stephen E. Straus
Published - The National Academy of Sciences

It's been posted up there numerous times.

Wouldn't vaping in a vacuum release all the toxins at the same time it released all the cannabiboids?

Would the vacuum have the same effect on carcinogens as it does cannabinoids?

I'm sure it would get you higher, and also be more efficient, but would it be as healthy as the current style of vaporizers are?

The carcinogens are formed during the combustion process, they don't exist until you start burning the herb.

It would be healthier because you could vaporize at much lower temperatures, which would ensure that no combustion takes place. Lowering the pressure would not lower the activation energy needed for combustion.

I guess I'm not the first one to have this idea, which is great. Hopefully people are working up designs and prototypes already! Bring on the vacuum vape!

The Bud Toaster - Model 13 Version 4

i had some discussion about reduced working pressure in the vape on Overgrow several years ago. My vape design has a restricted air intake (0.75mm intake holes), so i'm guessing that taking a hit reduces the atmospheric pressure in the bud chamber a little bit. And maybe that's all it takes. When i check the vape poop after a session, i am seeing only a few trichomes remaining.

i'm pretty satisfied with the extraction efficiency.

here's the current prototype:





Not pretty, but this model was built to test the design of the digital temp control system -- the pcb under the heater coil -- which turns out to work really well.

Battery powered, runs 35 minutes on a charge (15 minute recharge), 2 minutes from power on to first hit (temp is 420°F), automatic shutoff after 7 minutes, which is usually sufficient for the size of the "bowl" being used.

well if anyone has the time and equipment to fiddle with enthalpies of combustion of the plant material at different pressures (not just a vacuum) too, this probably would increase the amount of cannabinoids in the vapor... i doubt it would be significant enough to want to create a device to control the pressure with say an electric or hand pump everytime you repacked a bowl sounds expensive and prone to error.


but for the vacuum idea, on the top of my head, the heat transfer between the heating element and weed in a perfect vacuum is radiation which is still not going to toast the tasty stuff off it at a uniform rate so you are going to be leaving something behind, theres no such thing as 100% efficency in our world

after looking at my post i feel it was a downer haha but chances are that im wrong, and im glad people are always trying to improve the world of smoking