It’s a toption 1200mm I may have the nameplate on my phone somewhere. Not quite in production yet. Client landed six of them. I failed at dissuading them. Putting 25kW motors on the 840mm fuges I had would have been preferable imo.
Yeah, wasn’t until I got decent pumps that it became glaringly obvious that spraying in one direction only was NOT the right approach.
This reminds me - Spray balls are generally designed to work at/within a given pressure range.
If it’s designed to work at 80psi and you’re feeding it 15psi, you’re gonna have it limply leaking out instead of spraying out.
Feeding it 80 when it wants 40 is also going to substantially affect the spray pattern.
Putting a pressure gauge on the spray feed tube and tracking down a data sheet for the spray ball you’re using may save you some fabrication.
Remember as well that those pressures and flow rates on said data sheet are calibrated for water, and will likely not be 100% the same with alcohols or other liquids that are not water.
If a data sheet isn’t available, pumping your liquid of choice through the system with no bag in it and watching what it does through a viewport will likely be just as informative. Try varying your flow rate/pressure and see what that does to your spray pattern.
Now I want to sit inside and watch…
Only now?
Also remember that temperature and cannabinoid % can significantly change the way your fluid behaves, so ensuring that you’re testing with something as close to your working fluid as possible will make your life easier.
No… problem is it’s actually possible with these beasts.
@Lincoln20XX fantastic feedback thank you. i suspected that i’d need to pivot to spray from both sides, thanks to you and @cyclopath for confirming so i don’t have to find out myself. fuges out of balance are the kind of thing that keeps me up at night, even if we do have high vibrational fault auto-shutdown functions on our unit. in any case I see myself at the beginning of the 6+ iterations you’ve gone through to find your ideal sprayer.
we’ve tested our ball spray pattern without bags in the chamber and with (with chilled ethanol so as to replicate the actual process) and confirmed we get pretty great spray distribution. if anything there’s a little too much hitting the lid itself, which is true even with a bag loaded in, and even though the ball is located 1-2 inches under the center mass of the bags. i’ve never liked that, obv if ethanol’s hitting the top lid it’s not going inside the biomass (part of why i’m pursuing a different design), our spray ball is slotted style so i’ve been considering getting the top 1/4in or so of the slots welded shut.
the ball’s rated at 50gpm, and we get 40-50gpm from our AODD pumps, which is confirmed by the pump curves and also by simple flow rate tests with fixed volumes of chilled ethanol, pumped through the sprayer into our collection vessel.
to @SidViscous’s point, finding the balance of pressurizing the wand for that homogenous distribution is def a point i’m pursuing. might force me into holes vs. slits, or at least minimal slits. I’ve not gotten to test the pressure of the ethanol/slurry going into the sprayer yet, i’ll be adding a gauge to test that soon. i hadn’t up to this point bc we’re trying to limit steel tees/pieces added to the unit as the increased heat exchange brought by the method is stretching our ethanol chiller’s chill capacity to the limit, even with robust insulation on all parts and hoses. from pump to sprayer is maybe 5-6 feet of 1.5in hosing so we’re pretty much at the max pressure our pumps can generate, only way to increase that would be to switch to a smaller diameter hose, which i’m considering.
@cyclopath yeah the length of the rod is one of the bigger blockers so far, i’m extremely leery to the idea of making reinstalling the spray rod with every single bag part of our SOP.
much thanks to everyone for a lot of great feedback, this is def gonna save me some time and effort
I have not done this inside a centrifuge. I have done this with different kinds of spray lancers for different kinds of spraying for agglomerate generation in pharma mixing. There are so many different kinds of nozzles available - that will help you maintain appropriate pressure/flow at each location. So your idea #1 is right on.
We used to switch the nozzles out for different kinds of penetration and agglomerate sizing. The theory would be the same for wetting of any kind - misting, coating, soaking, etc.
I love what @Lincoln20XX is talking about what he has done in his basket. I wish I had that level of control here, sadly every time I try to change something on my process equipment I have to ask for permission from the CRA and have a third party come in and explain that I’m not trying to blow myself and my team up. x.X I mean I love safety, but damn!
What about a directional spider head instead of a spray ball or spray lance?
Does this mean that you have decided that in general gross agitation with cross lid dips is a non-functional approach for maximum efficiency? I assume there is some empirical evidence of this. I have noticed differences but I also noticed that those same differences were seen depending on the particle size of the material being extracted. And those same differences were seen with just a few degrees difference in temperature. And those same differences were seen with a few changes in ethanol to water ratios. My process controls haven’t been sufficient enough to hold all the things the same enough to make the differences I’m seeing be specific to any one item, especially since the differences I’m seeing are in the 0.25 to 1% range.
–Cass
Nah…
Not sure what iteration I’m on…
My team didn’t bite on that one. It looked too much like a bag killer. It’s still on the list to make these big ones play nice.
They DID insist I try wedge shaped bags. So I showed them what I meant when I said it wouldn’t work…
I’ve got a design to solve that.
At least for the cup-30.
I could get the prototype built and sell it to you for a fair price…if I charged you twice what it cost me @thesk8nmidget & I could haz ours too.
Hit me up in the DM if you’d like to persue
I’ve never talked with anyone using AODD pumps with sprayballs that was completely happy with the results they were getting.
Adding a damper in the system MAY help. It may not.
Not the worst problem to have - the amount hitting the lid is almost certainly limited relative to the total going in the system, and lets you know the ball is doing its thing.
That’s one of the few advantages of having most of the decision-makers here being engineers, and on very good terms with the fire marshall.
And of course, all of these modifications are on R&D systems.
For something simple that will probably get the job done, you could do worse than going for a 1" tube with slots cut at 0°,90°,180°,270° offset something like this.
But I also wonder if this might be solved by “more solvent” instead of fabrication.
If you’ve got full coverage with solvent … do you need more wash solvent? Or more virgin rinse? Or to keep the concentration of your wash solvent lower?
You could easily give something like this a shot, shouldn’t be too hard to find stuff already fabricated.
Not saying it’ll work any better than a spray ball - just that it shouldn’t be too difficult to mess around if you have time.
we have one, haven’t installed it yet as i’ve yet to hear it being necessary or make all that much of a difference. again we’re trying to limit places where heat could enter the flow, this would be a big one so we’re holding off on dampeners for now.
i see your point there. still I think i’m gonna be adjusting the slots much like Cyclo’s photo of the welded spray ball above; to me, if there’s spray going up and over the bag, that’s less spray going in and through the biomass. it also hits the sightglasses and obstructs our ability to see what’s going on inside, so our ability to assess proper spray would actually be helped by this.
oh absolutely, this is currently how we are adjusting to hit the extraction efficiencies we desire–simply longer recirculation of solvent/solution. it’s definitely working, we’re just a hair away from where we want to be on that. the improved sprayer is really intended to allow us to address the difference in post-extraction samples taken from top of bag vs. bottom (for example, top has 1% THC leftover, bottom has 4%), and to pare down extraction time spent on each sock as much as possible.
a few of our test iterations confirmed our virgin rinse is thorough enough, but great point of course.
to dial in the spray method so far we’ve been working with solution only half as concentrated as our former ‘normal’ method, just to remove that variable, and taking a small hit in the additional solvent recovery needed from that. once we get the extraction efficiency dialed in, that’s where we’ll be working towards next.
i like the slot arrangement you pictured there, going from 4 angles is even better than from 2 rows on opposite sides when it comes to balance. i’ve been using 3/4" tube so far, as I have a bunch leftover from another project, and figure smaller diameter will help with pressurizing the tube and ideal spray homogeneity.
again many thanks for your responses
thanks for those examples, there’s definitely a lot of ways to go on this. I find myself with more time than usual to mess around with different iterations, best believe i will me messin’
These worked ok with a 1/2” AODD. Once I put a real pump on there it became clear I needed holes on the other side too.
that’s a lot like what was in my head initially.
can i ask what you mean by a ‘real’ pump? different style pump, larger-than-1/2", both?
do i take it this 45-degree on the bottom was your solution to direct spray to the bottom portions of the bag while keeping the length of the sprayer shorter?
yep. didn’t have any choice on length in those baskets at the time. removed the obstruction and rebalanced rotors.
Both.
1/2" AODD might have managed 70liters/min. I can get 30kg in the bag. it worked, but nowhere near what I’d achieved in smaller fuges.
the pulsing from an AODD isn’t ideal here either.
I believe the pumps I’ve got for the 1200mm fuges I’m working on spinning up will hit 1000l/min if I ask them to (possibly twice that if I insist).
which changes the problem from “how do I make this work” to “how do I stop the operator from flooding the room in 6 seconds flat”.
my least favorite thing about that style. really my only complaint, it delivers in all other aspects, and centrifugals proved to add too much heat to our process. lucky for us the pulsing does not throw our fuge’s balance off to the point of faulting, which was my biggest concern
jesus christ dude
exactly!
that’s what HX are for…
tbh first i’m hearing of these. thanks for that breadcrumb, from initial searches i can see how these would be pretty ideal.
unfortunately for the moment we’re tasked with making these AODDs work for us, and they will.
if only i had a big pile of capital hanging around…
More is better. That’s what more means.
Alternately: you can pretty much always turn it down, it’s hard to turn things up past a certain point.
I think one of the three of us is receiving a different message than that being transmitted… surely you’ve heard of heat exchangers in the past?
(Hint to those following along at home: avoid copper-brazed plate exchangers if you can/care about your product and patients. Now that Duda’s got nickel brazed ones in stock again I might pick up another one or two to keep on the shelf.)
