Soxhlet extractor
piece of laboratory apparatus
A Soxhlet extractor is a piece of laboratory apparatus invented in 1879 by Franz von Soxhlet. It was originally designed for the extraction of a lipid from a solid material. Typically, Soxhlet extraction is used when the desired compound has a limited solubility in a solvent, and the impurity is insoluble in that solvent. It allows for unmonitored and unmanaged operation while efficiently recycling a small amount of solvent to dissolve a larger amount of material.
Description
A Soxhlet extractor has three main sections: a percolator (boiler and reflux) which circulates the solvent, a thimble (usually made of thick filter paper) which retains the solid to be extracted, and a siphon mechanism, which periodically empties the condensed solvent from the thimble back into the percolator.
Assembly
The source material containing the compound to be extracted is placed inside the thimble.
The thimble is loaded into the main chamber of the Soxhlet extractor.
The extraction solvent to be used is placed in a distillation flask.
The flask is placed on the heating element.
The Soxhlet extractor is placed atop the flask.
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This entry incorporates text from “Soxhlet extractor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.