I have these 540L vessels I use to place the nugs in or biomass to extract with propane and when finished I vacuum
It out with a well grounded atex ventilator and a cyclone to catch the flowers
I inject a decent amount of nitrogen from the botom in the vessel to keep the
Oxigen levels as low as possible
And it works but I did have an isseu inside the cyclone with ignition Wich
Since it s outside the booth and the building gave little problems but
It did make me think
So idee is a permanently placed screw inside the vessel that once the botom is opened will unload the flower quick
I don’t believe the screw pictured will work as well as you hope it will, because it doesn’t come close enough to the walls.
I’m guessing that design is based on the vessel at hand, ie the holes available for insertion.
Cylinders are way easier to unload…
I actually built a hash cannon just this morning…didn’t get pictures (maybe @thesk8nmidget can dig up video from our security footage?).
There are other strategies, but most of the ideas I have on the subject are ones pulled from @Lincoln20XX’s head…I suspect he’d be more inclined to share them on a private channel.
I assume your vessel is jacketed and cold as fuck, which would put scaling this strategy off the table…
Internal auger is great in concept, but I think cyclo is right and it’s going to be a massive headache unless you can get an auger in there that’s really close to the walls.
How well that is going to work is going to depend on your material grind, how packed it is, the overall shape of the vessel, and any number of other fun things.
Cylindrical vessels are the best way to do work with augers, anything else becomes a real headache in a few ways.
I like working with liquids. They move around real simply, and if you use the right pump, you can pump shockingly large particles.
So mix it with water and pump it out as a slurry? This is not quite as simple as one would think, but once you figure it out it can be a helpful trick.
(Which then begs the question - if we’re removing it as a slurry, why don’t we feed it as a slurry and extract it as a slurry before removing it as a slurry?)
Of course, introducing and then removing water or any other liquid could potentially be problematic as well.
What size ports do you have available to you top and bottom? What are your approximate tank dimensions?
Thx champs !
The vessel size is approx 2 meters by
65 cm and the max clamp size is 6”
Reason I think it might work is I run full nugs and do not compress yust place flowers in and that’s it
Want to keep the flowers as intact as possible since it gives a better extract
Dome or dished bottom? You’ll likely find that the material bridges and builds up on the walls. You could help mitigate that by modifying the auger, but it’s always going to be a real kludge.
Just use two Chimney Sweep fiberglass poles taped together. Poke a hole through the column with them from top to bottom and shimmy against the sides. should be done within 15 minutes! Way easier if your just extracting nugs vs compacted ground biomass but works with either
What about some of the food industry filling equipment? I know the auger style design is used for very accurately dosing ground spices, cereal, and other dry ingredients. Wolf for example has some options that do this.
To overcome this problem the engineers made one end of the column a movable piston, using hydraulic technology and seals…so you just retract piston leaving the cylinder empty. Pour in your column matrix in slurry form, however much you wanted and put the micron frit on top and close the top off with bolts as pictured. Activate the hydraulic cylinder and press your chromatography matrix to the fixed bed compression factor one desired. Fluid is pumped though a ported hole in the center of the head. When finished with that packing, you just remove the head piece and continue activating the cylinder to its top most position which pushes the chromatographic material out as a puck.
While the system is filled with your nugs…you just pump your extraction fluid through it. Capisce? Then just form a puck by activating the cylinder and push material out…
There is a fellow in PDX, that can build and design these …any size any pressure.
If they’re just poured in dry and not compressed at all I could see an auger like this working, but if you need to compress it almost any auger I can imagine is going to work against you or leave uncompressed material behind some parts of it
Next question I’d be asking is what do you do with the offgassing material you’ve just pushed out of your vessel? At some point you’re going to have to deal with the oxygen and fuel mixture getting into the ignitable range which is probably what happened when it had the issue inside the cyclone (guessing a cyclonic separator?)
Unfortunately I’m not aware of an economical way to quickly produce enough nitrogen to overwhelm your propane when moved thru any sort of vacuum system
Ok so this has become a pita
I realized fairly early that the auger idea was not a real solution to the problem since biomass holds more butane than I realized once purged and ready to swap
After doing calculations of what exactly means 1% in volume of air
The max butane lower explosion limit I dare to play with
Wich is far more complicated at first sight since we first pull a vacuum on our recently filled biomass then administer butane and then recover the the butane
Wich leaves a damp/dry extracted biomass in a supposedly safe way to proceed and swap it for fresh biomass
O boy well calculations are great but honestly in this riddle pretty useless
So in the end I got my numbers from the old recovery unit and weighing scale and patience since I let it suck on the vessel for a straight day and
Turns out that in on my rig there is still 230 grams entrained in the biomass when the vessel hits vacuĂĽm levels and normally this is when I open her up to swap biomass
230 grams is 4 moles of butane
And enough to set things on fire
( reason this quest started)
The solution I have found is not only
Blanketing with N2 but to heat and recirculate this N2 in the vessel for about in my case 15 min so vacuum pump puls and exhaust go s treu a gas heater treu the biomass from botom to top and again etc circulating and heating the biomass by wich the entrained butane releases and a beter purge is achieved
Once the top temperature is at 50 C
I know I lowered my butane content sufficiently to proceed with vacuuming it out
I would almost say it speeds up the average purge time on any rig but I ll leave that to whoever thinks that makes sense to try
The gas heater I use is from
Basicly a pipe with a heating element around and some sintered metal core in the pipe for heat transfer
I asked specifically for a heating element that cannot get hotter than 350C to stay away from autoignition temps
O once I am done and 50C is the temp in the top of the vessel I yust switch the vacuum pump exhaust to
Release to the air and pull vacuum
With a singel stage 40cfm pump
Try getting 56 kg of biomass out treu a 6” hole with only 80cm between the floor and vessel it s a mess I can tell you that much
My ceiling height is only 380Cm reason I only have 80cm
To me bottom discharge sounds like a better idea under your circumstances as I understand them. Maybe you can build a rectangular box on four wheels that would fit underneath with Wall height of around 50 cm (to give you enough space between the top of the sidewall and the bottom of your vessel to give you enough space to reach through and open the vessel) and as wide as will fit under your vessel and as long as you needed to be to fit all the biomass in
