I’m working on designing and having a high volume ethanol (or other alcohol) recovery system manufactured to my specifications, and I’ve had enough interest expressed in the concept by various people that I figured I should test the waters here and see if y’all might be interested in it.
I’m not certain, but I think I can probably get the bare steel (no heat/cooling/vacuum) units to a price that is competitive with the good falling film units out there - my target is at least 500L/hr evaporation throughput at under 250k USD, but that might be a bit optimistic.
It should be easy to put together in configurations of roughly 250/500/750/1000L/hr ethanol evaporation, assuming you’ve got sufficient heating and cooling. It’ll be C1D2 safe, all stainless, designed to be cGMP compliant with a CIP system and all that jazz. Effectively pharmaceutical design.
I’m going to be working with the manufacturer over the next few weeks, and if there’s enough interest I’ll keep y’all in the loop as it progresses.
2 Likes
Can attest: there is interest, but many other established solvent recovery manufacturers to compete with. Time/cost, to see if your efforts with your provider are ‘worth’ it to you both. Maybe inquire with other manufacturers, to see how many units they sell/year, to get a sense of demand for more established providers?
Frankly I know it would be a very niche market - I’d be doing this more as a way to make them available to the industry rather than as a way to make a lot of money. For something this specialized I’d be shocked if I sold 5-10 of them in a year.
I figured if I’m already going through getting it made, might as well see if I can get some economies of scale working for me, and try to give back to the industry in a small way.
2 Likes
How did you make out with this project? Any updates?
Still at the (re)drawing board. We’re moving away from extraction and recovery systems that require solvent phase changes, but might still need something to handle a couple of hundred liters per hour.
I’ve done most of the up front work but it’s taken a back burner to our extractor design and r&d.
1 Like