Ban bang 
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…Tech lays down the law 
…
I am also skeptical with regards to justification of WFE vs FFE, especially for propane.
Seems to me like the main purpose of the WFE is for molecular distillation or high viscosity fluids, doesn’t seem necessary for propane… could help for butane but propane should rip in an FFE.
I could be missing something here.
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We started in the cannabis community but then hemp has been our primary focus only due to the fact there are not too many cannabis operators wanting to process 1000# per shift. There are a few and some struggling to make it with other systems. We went to hemp because 1000# per shift was a small amount considering, but we brought to the table crude quality from the cannabis industry. This gave us a chance to prove our machines to the world and now we are coming back to the cannabis industry.
We have since gone backwards and made our Turbo Unit that can process 200# per shift as a single column unit, and its expansion kit to add another 400# capacity.
Is this the mysterious patent pending High Pressure Hydrocarbon Extraction (HPHE) that is mentioned but not explained on your website and IG?
- Yes. It is similar to a refrigeration system. How often do you top off your refrigerator? How much solvent does it require to maintain the zones as required under the conditions? We only need 60# of solvent to operate our entire Behemoth. All day long, don’t even need to put it back into the tank until the end of the day (pretty advanced).
If you take a given cylinder length and width and one utilizes the inside diameter surface area only (WFE) and the other is filled with a tube sheet (FFE), how can the WFE have exponentially greater surface area?
- Not so much actual physical area, but the wiping action increases the surface area of the liquid being moved to the wall being heated via agitation.
- Our wfe is a positive pressure unit, it is not designed to operate below a specified pressure.
- Finally, it is not there to replace vacuum ovens, it is only to remove the majority volume of the most volatile component as fast as possible from a very viscus product while pulling crude from the storage vats.
Who in their right mind is gonna want to extract 1000# per 8hrs by packing, unpacking and then cleaning 7-10# socks continuously?
- Yea I would agree its good work to run 1000# per day, our guys in Wisconsin are already doing it. They feel they could run more if they used the more advanced tech of just moving the gas from side to side instead of a complete recovery at the end of the run. Our California clients are well on their way as well running cannabis. Next up to train the two local operators on their units.
IMO for making crude a continuous process or at least one with larger material holding vats has a major advantage over you here.
- We have much larger automated designs in progress. There is a HUGE problem with just going to a larger vat size; ASME wall thickness & the fact that stainless is more of an insulator than conductor of heat.
Do you include the packing, unpacking and cleaning of the material socks in the 1000# per 8hrs claim?
- Yes. Socks are packed in a separate room and stored for later use. 100# per hour is a more appropriate rate. This machine is designed to operate 24/7.
It is not too difficult to advance a technology that is still living in the primordial times. It all revolves around pressure and how to use it to your advantage. Understanding gaseous solvents and what happens when they are compressed above normal temp/pressure relationship. We use a Phase Transient solvent that is not a solid liquid nor gas nor supercritical, but rather a mixture of vapor and liquid, also known as a saturated vapor. We have calculated every stage of our system and what the quality state of the gas is (liquid/vapor) at all points. For instance, an average liquid density ranges between 75-90% liquid depending on the situation in the extraction column. Once you understand the basics of our units you will smack yourself in the head… happens every time we train.
Its kind of like a radio; when tuned you can hear the station great, but when out of tune will sound like garbage or have no sound at all.
(Sadly hash people get it the least or not at all)
@GreenProcessSolution If you think about your statement, my purpose for the WFE is to distill the majority propane (highly volatile) out of the highly viscous crude with the shortest residence time possible. This is great for temperature-sensitive mixtures such as cannabinoids & terpenes. 
Located in Fort Collins, Colorado!
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Sooo, its been a few days…has anyone taken it upon themselves to trial this method for a proof of concept? Can we advance this discussion or are we gonna table it as “marketing BS”?
I can see how folks would be skeptical, and agree there is a tinge of a “marketing tone” in Zachs posts here, but i cant blame em for “tooting their own horn”, they are selling a system designed for this mode of operation after all (people gotta eat).
I can say that 1) My team has tried this on a very rudimentary level to see for ourselves months ago and got results that showed it can work and does have some advantages that help with scaling LPG based extraction processes. It could be difficult to configure a pre-existing system for this type of operation safely, but that doesnt mean it cant be done.
I have also seen their system in person and can vouch for the design/build and its functionality.
No doubt, with the Behemoth, theres quite a bit of column/sock packing required, but that issue can easily be solved in their larger designs.
Its a bit different approach for sure, but is a valid approach and any system utilizing this method should be designed for such in order to safely and consistently perform such operation.
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It is likely the most difficult way to operate and extract in the world, but if understood, is roughly 50 to 200 times (or more depending on your ratio) more efficient than the traditional technique. We have a deep understanding of the actual physics behind it’s operation and have utilized this as much as possible within our design! There is more to it than one would think!
Our Behemoth can easily operate within a F1 Occupancy (without sprinklers) operating on a 100# supply tank and still process up to 1000# per day!!
We are going down the road now to automate our Behemoth design so as to take the difficulty of operation / training and make it into a simple push button operation!! All future designs will follow suit with automation as it is the only way to scale past 1000# per day and not burden the user too much.
We are fully open to licensing opportunities with our technologies! If it is something your interested in learning as much as possible (from the source), just send us an email to Sales@illuminatedextractors.com! We have all the details, from phase diagrams and states to theoretical concepts and how they can be directly applied and more!!
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Oh I see.
You’re not talking about that pesky “actual physical” type of surface area.
Just that hypothetical, marketing bullshit type of surface area.
And your second two bullet points are just more marketing BS that have nothing to do with proving the other bogus claims you’ve made about less residence time, more efficiency and less height required for a WFE.
A wiped film evaporator configuration is needed when distillation is occurring at temperatures close to the thermal degradation point of the target compounds.
Removing propane from cannabis oil, whether it’s crude or live resin, doesn’t require temperatures anywhere near what would thermally degrade the compounds in a serious way.
A wiped film evaporator configuration is certainly not necessary to remove propane from crude and needlessly sacrifices the internal volume of the tube to fit the wiper assembly when it could be taken up by a tube sheet. It also needlessly adds the cost/complexity of needing a rotary seal.
A FFE based on tube-in-shell designs would pack MUCH more surface area into the same volume as your WFE and is probably more efficient.
IMO you are way off base with this one man. If a wiped film configuration equated to “exponentially greater” effective surface area over a tube-in-shell falling film a lot of other industries would be going that direction.
It’s probably best to just admit you’re wrong on this.
I’m guessing that the capitalization of Phase Transient wasn’t an accident. That probably means it’s another of your bullshit marketing terms.
A saturated vapor is a vapor, plain and simple.
A saturated liquid is a liquid.
It sounds like what you’re trying to describe is a saturated mixture meaning saturated liquid and vapor in equilibrium. The percentage of the mixture that’s liquid or vapor depends on the conditions.
It’s definitely not a unique state of matter like you are trying to describe it.
Lol. Phase Transient.
I’m sure the Chad’s eat that right up tho.
If the basics are so head smackingly enlightening, why don’t you just explain them to us instead of giving us the Chad routine?
Why make us email you? Just post up the details, diagrams and theoretical concepts for us all to see.
I just watched a YouTube video of an interview with one of your reps at a convention who said the cost of a Behemoth is $800,000.
IMO that is truly outrageous for what this is man.
$800K for a crude machine claiming a measly 1000# per 8 hr shift while having to continuously pack/unpack 10# socks?
And I’m super skeptical of the 1000# per 8 hours claim to begin with.
I’ll bet you need 4+ people working to achieve that. If it’s even possible, I’ll bet it’s not sustainable for long.
This is crazy for crude production when systems using less volatile solvents can do way more throughput while requiring much less labor, all for a much cheaper price to boot.
That’s because this is a machine for Chads, not people who know how to make hash.
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I’m sticking with marketing BS for now.
He hasn’t really explained anything outright that is worth trialing, IMO.
What exactly did you guys try?
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Sorry our WFE does not appeal to you, we can sell you a FFE as well; I wouldn’t use it. Maybe make a semi-endless stack that’s about 20 feet in length. Have fun when it clogs. Our mechanical seal works great and is LPG rated for 400 psi!
Secondly, the temperature required within the WFE is dependent on the pressure at which you are operating. As the pressure increases, the point at which products want to boil / degrade also increases. No different than boiling point decrease due to vacuum conditions. The exact amount of positive pressure is paramount to its most efficient operation.
Thirdly, we are not going to open-source our machine just to make a couple people happy about how it works. You want proof, I will show you a video of it operating. We have dumped multiple kilos per run with ease. Our machine in Wisconsin can easily crush 1000# in a shift. They now have more crude than they know what to do with… California cannabis is online, our local units Fort Collins finalizing their PSI review and Loveland is set to be shortly thereafter. Not to mention all of our smaller units operate on pretty much the same tech. Fort Collins has one of my first units still in operation running cannabis - they extracted a 19.76% total terpene Durban Poison with a single column version thats missing half of the features!
Saturated vapor-liquid mixture is what takes place after the condenser in pretty much every refrigeration system. The amount of liquid content can be calculated by the refrigerant quality calculation at stage 4 of a refrigeration system. Our average liquid density is 75-90% (depending on conditions) within the extraction column, non-stop, until the extraction process is complete.
“Phase transient” would be a state between that of a vapor and that of a liquid, which is the case of what we experience as it becomes a fog like state of ranging density based on the input conditions. It has a different approach when it comes to solvent size and how it diffuses into the biomass. Solvent channeling is no more an issue as the pressure is equal everywhere and once past a certain point, its pretty much all liquid, and since it is cycling, it is a moving liquid-vapor mixture. So if you picture the column of biomass as a wet sponge in a tube that your then blasting 100 psi of vapor through… It will gladly extract itself once it is liquidized by the solvent that is constantly wetting the bio. Extraction per 10# column is usually complete in 3-7 minutes depending on cannabinoid concentration.
We have a single column turbo unit pushing over 200# per shift - ran by a 65 yr old and a 35 yr old sock packer. They think its funny, ran 225# the other day in 6 hr because the new guy is actually packing socks and getting 17# avg instead of the 12# he was getting. If they can do it, I can’t see why it would be a problem for anyone else.
Manifolding off to a crystallization tank / bottom drain from the basin is still a viable option for those who prefer that technique. Depending on your drain tech it could potentially be faster due to not recovering all of the the remaining solvent in the product. Our GD1 tends to leave just under 5000 ppm of residual solvent in the crude. All columns are jacketed for hot/cold operation and inline filtration / dewax / crc columns are standard on every system! We designed the system to be operated in nearly every way possible, we can even dedicate one tank as a low quality and one as high quality and fraction every run into independent recovery tanks.
Not to mention the terpene retention we get with propane! Ooh my!
Call it BS marketing, but it is how our system works. Mind explaining how a refrigerator needs only a few hundred grams of solvent and does not ever need to be topped off but can still refrigerate non-stop and still keep your food and beer at a savvy temp? Its obviously not possible right?
Good hash is not difficult to make. Have been doing it for years. HPHE makes wonderful product, sorry you are missing out!
ASME B31.3 for wall thickness calculations.
Stainless Steel thermal conductivity = 8.09 / steel at 50.2 / aluminum at 205.0 / copper at 385.0.
^^^ Poor conductor of heat … … … … … … … vs … … … … … … … Good conductor of heat ^^^
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Why not try one of our units before deciding I am feeding you false truth… ?
It is what it is.
The Behemoth is not the only unit we make… It is just the current largest model in operation, with much larger units in design with dedicated fresh frozen bio feed. We also have smaller units in operation all the way down to 20-30# per shift (2-5# bio columns), our Turbo Units at 200# per shift (12-18# bio columns), and an expansion kit to add another 300# per shift capacity as well as crc/chroma and expansion / storage space before entering the WFE.
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i’d put a single sub 42inch falling film shell tube vs your wiper.
the actual surface area just isn’t comparable.
how many kw/btu are you putting into generating vapor?
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I suspect Zack is useing the WFE specifically with propane because:
- It allows almost total removal of propane at moderate pressure (50-200 Psi)
- Moderate pressure (50-200 Psi) allows high density, which allows high mass flow rates without huge line (and valve) sizes. (avoids flow choking)
I suspect it would run at a slower rate with 100% N-Butane, my preferred solvent.
Downsides of an FFE would be potentially more residual solvent in the output.
Upside of the FFE would be mechanically simpler, fewer seals etc.
To each his own.
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ffe into wfe may be the ticket for pure crude purge speed.
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Fuck crude, live resin wfe !
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anybody thinking a FFE would get more solvent out then a wiper…HAS NEVER RAN A WIPER lmao
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or should i say, doesnt know how to run a wiper properly/ screwing up big time
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You pretty much hit the nail on the head… The moderate pressure for butane is shifted from that of propane pretty low but still exists (16 to 65 psi instead of 50 to 200 psi). We made a point to reduce flow choking to an absolute minimal across the whole of our unit and even used it as an intentional part of the system in specific places to benefit from the capillary action.
“I suspect it would run at a slower rate with 100% N-Butane, my preferred solvent.”
- The pressures will be much lower during operation but will still work with excellent speed. The ratio of liquid solvent injected to jacket fluid density is rather extreme which makes it very difficult to experience thermal lock-out during operation. We ran a butane/propane mixture in California without any issues. Honestly, having a little butane in there made it work a little better.
“Downsides of an FFE would be potentially more residual solvent in the output.”
“Upside of the FFE would be mechanically simpler, fewer seals etc.”
- You are correct, we were after a minimal solvent retention in our crude prior to removal from the system with the fewest amount of components inline. Yes it is not mechanically simple, but it is very effective in both operation and cost.
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FFE - more physical surface area of heat transfer. WFE - thinner film
I agree with @downtheterphole. Gimme FFE for the bulk, and WFE for the finish!
We actually perform the bulk recovery from the main storage tank… The WFE takes care of the last couple gallons in a superb fashion. Usually takes about 5-10 min to drain the entire run.
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