Hi there! Thank you for making this website and being the brains behind it.
It seems like an ethanol reflux still fell into our company’s lap. Because of market costs, I thought it would be smart to make ethanol for our extractions and sell to interested extractors at a very affordable price. I read a lot of great threads on this site about distilling ethanol and found some really interesting articles on graywolfslayer.
I’ve never made ethanol before, and these are the best shots of the equipment I have right now. If these pictures are useful, I’d like to know what the group thinks about the gear and what we might be missing.
I will take better pictures of the parts as soon as I can get to the equipment. A Colorado extractor custom-made this system for himself. We bought it used from him. It looks like Rainier Distillers sells the same kind of gear.
I’m planning small-scale production of superior ethanol CDA designed for extraction, not 710 solution. I can write more about my plans and what I think may be a better ethanol CDA than 710 and undenatured ethanol if anyone is interested.
Edit: looks like one might be able to get back what one started with, with careful distillation…and that there are other ratios one might instead end up with.
We looked into this years ago and even bought a reflux still to experiment with. We just couldn’t justify the cost at all to produce 200 proof ethanol.
Now, if you can make something more cost effective, that would be interesting. We’re actually planning to sell the still soon since we haven’t used it.
I wonder if you could extract with sonication, separate with decanter centrifuge, filter with membranes - if you could get by with extracting with water or something far cheaper than CDA12?
I agree, @321MBT , please do! Err… you may have already. I’m not finished reading the thread. I note Homer looks like ai, so this likely isn’t too old a thread, right? Meh.
I would advise against ternary azetropes (those of 3 components) in general, but I admittedly don’t know enough about EA beyond some crystallization stuff I did with it. The fact that this ternary system is composed of all 3 potential binary systems (every one of the components can azeotrope with every other one of them), unlike the heptane stuff (heptane🚫water) and albeit somewhat counterintuitively, may make it more manageable a mixture of measured materials to maintain. I say this because evaporating ALL of the solvent that returns from extraction (including the excess water almost invariably coming off the biomass with wach run) should yield the ternary AND an aqueous heavy binary layer (i.e. a layer largely just water) that you can physically remove by siphon or whatever… instead of having to dehydrate the mixture with molecular sieve, as with the 710 heptane stuff.
Shit. A year old. I’m so sllllloowww…
Oh, and I really wish our industry could use the SDA with just isopropanol in the ethanol, as that would be ideal. I’m told the FDA only allows it to be sold to pharmaceutical manufacturers. Bastids.
