Hi everyone,
I wanted to get some opinions on what distillation equipment I should get.
Options are a used KD 30 for 195K or a brand new KDT-6 Dual stage for 245K.
The goal of this distillation equipment is to keep up with a rotachrom 5L + a Gilson 1L CPC’s.
What would you go with if you were me and why? Thanks!
Cheers,
-Kyle
KD 30 is hard to control at deep vacuum levels, people tend to do higher temp distillations to strip their material and feed it into a kd6. I’ve stripped 15L in an hour and polished 6-7 L in an hour (at 167 deg C)
Kdt 6 will give you about 700 g - 1100 g an hour depending on input purity.
How much material do you need repolished a day?
I’m trying to get about 1000Kg-1500Kg of 3rd pass distillate/month
Edit: these numbers are running 24Hrs/day 24 Days/Month
So 50 - 75 L a day working 20 days a month about. I’ve never been able to achieve this. I assume your input % purity is pretty high so your systems will run on the high end of their capabilities.
With a two stage 6, hopefully continuous discharge, you’re around 352L /month working 16 hr days for 20 days a month. This is two pass. To triple pass this, again assuming that the first stage has its own diff pump or turbo, that number drops significantly, to around 175L a month.
A single 30, you’d want to probably plan strip days and polish days. Since that time is spent doing other work you’d figure that 1/2 of the time will be spent stripping and the other half polishing/repolishing. Since the color isn’t likely to improve on a second pass on a 30, I don’t really recommend a second polish on such a huge column unless your system was well assembled and is capable of running below .009 torr or below with all vacs on. So you’re looking at 960L of B grade two pass oil a month working 16 hour days 20 days a month. Again if you were to refeed and polish that, your number would drop though it’s harder to ballpark how much.
All of this assumes minimal issues and good technician time management, as well as continuous discharge pumps (meaning no reason to stop, disaaaemble, clean, start and pray your vac returns to where it was before ~ 45 minutes of labor every 7 hours).
I’ve heard that the KDT-6 Dual stage can do about 4L/Hr (input).
I’m going to do the math for my own sake, not to argue with you! Please let me know if any of my numbers look funny…
Also do you have any tips on separating the terps from the residual solvent on the initial strip?
If I were able to process 4L Crude (input)/Hr then at a ~70% Yield on 2 passes I would be getting about 2.8Kg of 2nd pass distillate/hr.
Let’s say I have all of the diffusion/discharge/feeding pumps necessary to have it be mostly continuous and let’s account for 45min every 8hr (for easier maths sake) and let’s also say I’m operating 16hr per day. That means I have an actual operation time of 16-(0.75x2)=14.5Hr
14.5Hr x 2.8L 2nd pass output/Hr = 40L 2nd pass output/day
Now let’s say that we’re running our rotachrom with ~600g/run @20min/run
That’s 1.8kg (input)/Hr @ 80% yield = 1.44Kg output T-free per hour
Let’s say we did this for 12 days
12 days x (4L/Hr x 14.5Hr) = 696Kg input crude in 12 Days
12 days x (2.8kg output/hr x 14.5hr) = 487kg 2nd pass distillate output/12 Days
Now let’s say the rotachrom does 1.8Kg input/Hr at 15 hours per day (1hr for sample prep and other downtime)
1.8Kg x 15hr = 27Kg input per day
@80% yield = 21.6Kg T-free output per day
Now let’s run that for 12 days
27kg/day x 12 days = 324Kg Input distillate/12 days
324Kg @ 80% Yield = 259Kg T-free output/12 days
487Kg 2nd pass output/12 days - 324Kg input to rotachrom = 163Kg surplus
The only questions is will I have enough time to repolish my T-free to get that nice golden color at the end of the month.
The numbers I am asking for are representing 24Hr/day 24 Days/month model so they are really trueing to maximize the equipment.