PORTLAND, Ore. – Aptia Engineering continues to provide industry-leading botanical processing equipment with its development of the versatile HCE Hydrocarbon Extraction Platform. With a focus on sound engineering, modular configurability, and ease of operation, the HCE Platform offers hydrocarbon processors increased productivity at competitive prices.
Rapid growth in the botanical processing industry has demanded innovation in the supporting equipment and technology. While many technologies have dramatically improved over the last few years, hydrocarbon extraction equipment has largely remained unimproved.
Aptia’s founder, Shale Flora states that “Hydrocarbon processors have been forced to settle for sub-par equipment, because equipment manufacturers have been more focused on importing cheap hardware than on engineering high-quality, innovative solutions. This has forced hydrocarbon processors to be extremely creative in adapting and customizing their systems to get the performance that they need. Our goal in developing the HCE platform was to innovate and to resolve as many of the common problems as possible.”
Through intelligent engineering, the team at Aptia has provided a powerful, reliable, and sensible hydrocarbon extraction solution for botanical processors. Key advantages to Aptia’s HCE Platform include:
Rapid Solvent Recovery
Hydrocarbon processors are accustomed to waiting for solvent to recover, and then waiting again for that solvent to be chilled for extraction. These pauses result in lost productivity and a reduction in extraction throughput. When designing the HCE Platform, Aptia’s engineering team carefully sized the evaporation, condensing, and cooling equipment to ensure that the solvent recovery and solvent cooling rates match the rate at which solvent is required to continue extracting. This improvement allows for nearly continuous extraction.
Strategic Modularity
Strategic modularity was designed into the HCE Platform so that growing companies could scale operations without replacing the whole extraction system. Every HCE system is initially configured to match the performance metrics of each processing facility, and can be easily expanded. For example, the recovery capacity of an Aptia HCE system can be doubled from 100 Lbs/Hr to 200 Lbs/Hr by adding one subunit, or can be further increased to 500 Lbs/Hr by the addition of a falling film parts kit.
Thoughtful Engineering
The Aptia HCE system is designed to eliminate nuisances and inefficiencies such as manually flipping recovery compressors on/off, dealing with extract foam-over during recovery, mitigating inconsistent product quality, waiting on sluggish recovery rates, and replacing improperly rated valves and hardware that operate at temperatures as low as -80 C.
The team at Aptia is proud to include the HCE Hydrocarbon Extraction Platform among their broad range of powerful and intelligently designed botanical processing equipment solutions.
For more information visit https://aptiaengineering.com/equipment/refinement/hce-hydrocarbon-extractor/ or email: [email protected]
About Aptia Engineering
Aptia Engineering is a specialized engineering & manufacturing firm delivering process equipment to hemp and other industries that is powerful, efficient, and dependable.
Aptia works to reduce the total cost of ownership by optimizing all systems for throughput, efficiency, capital investment, and durability. Designed and built in the USA, Aptia’s equipment is innovative and robust, giving our clients the distinct competitive edge.
Aptia’s unique “More than Metal” philosophy ensures that our clients receive application specific engineering and innovation, top quality project execution, and unrivaled pre-sale and post-sale technical services and support in the industry. Manufacturing success is built upon more than hardware.
Our industry leading processes include Hydrocarbon Extraction, Solvent Recovery, Winterization, Wiped Film Distillation, as well as custom solutions.
