Presuming you’re washing an alkane with something denser (water/methanol/etc):
Fill column with your alkane.
Spray your wash liquid on top of the alkane.
Wash liquid falls through alkane, picks up whatever it picks up.
Pump out the bottom at the same rate you pump into the top.
If you want to push something lighter through something heavier, you instead pump/spray into the bottom, take off on the top.
Hmm now that’s an interesting way to look at it a liquid scrubber
Cool idea gona try some
Then swap the water base or neutral
Etc etc
That needs some coalescing filtration and additional drying. This works for about 5-7kg an hour in a 6" column. A centrifuge will get you in the 10-50kg/hour range.
The sight glasses are mostly to make sure that your gear pumps are working at the same speed, and so you can keep an eye on emulsion layers etc if they form.
Our next iteration is going to be a 2m tall 12" TC column with sight glasses top and bottom.
Designed for automated multi-stage washing/scrubbing/LLE work. Just connect as many valves/tanks as you want, and sequence them appropriately.
We’ve found a couple of operations that require more than a gentle column liquid exchange and this doesn’t work for those, but it covers most standard use cases.
The cheapest non-rusted&busted disc stack I’ve ever seen was about $20k USD.
A 12" x 2m column allows me to wash well over 100L of target per hour, even with multiple stages of washing.
And I think I’ll be into it for about $2.5k at the end of the day.
At the moment I am running 3x 100 liter vessels with agitation and since I don t have emulsions (lucky me)
With 3 way valves connected I am at 50 kg an hour 6 washes that is so gooing and comming back to vessel 1
Moving solvent by one vacuum pump
I ll give you a heads up when I see one
Often for 5 K
I guess it depends on what you can support with solvent recovery as well. When doing butane LLE in a column, i usually end up around 80-90% solvent to avoid emulsions. When using a centrifuge, it’s easy to go with 50%. One is for polishing finished goods. The other is for degumming to keep wipers happy.
Come to think of it Ione could probably get this automated with a fraqtion finder
Treu the glas
That presumes that the fraction finder gives you useful information. I have yet to observe anything useful coming out of ours.
We’ve paid 20ish for new. Just not Alfa. It’s a hammer, not a scalpel. There are tons of options. It ain’t about how much you pay, but how you use it.
We’ll sell a turnkey, automated disc stack for 150k.
al it has to tel me is water or emulsion meaning a good split or an isseu 
A turbidity meter can do that. Use specific gravity for solvent:oil ratio.
What do most folks actually do with waste water ? I keep seperate the gunk loaded washes and RO the light dirty washes to a 1-10 concentration
IS that what most do or are you aloud to drain in the sewage ?
Drain to a tank that if it isn’t contaminated with alkane, gets dumped in the sewer. Water, ethanol and organic gums are the only thing getting dumped.