Soxhlet Extractor

A Soxhlet extractor is a piece of laboratory apparatus invented in 1879 by Franz von Soxhlet, originally created for extracting lipids from solid materials. It is especially useful when the compound being extracted has limited solubility in a solvent while the surrounding impurities remain insoluble, since it lets a small amount of solvent be recycled repeatedly through a larger quantity of material without being watched. The apparatus has three main parts: a percolator that circulates the solvent, a thimble made of filter paper that holds the solid being extracted, and a siphon that periodically drains the condensed solvent back into the percolator. The solvent is heated to reflux, vaporizes, cools in a condenser, and drips onto the solid, and once the chamber holding the solid nearly fills, the siphon empties it back into the distillation flask, a cycle that repeats many times over hours or days until the desired compound has concentrated in the flask. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/