If you’re actually getting 1lb of material into 3lb of ethanol at 6.8lb/gal, you’re still using a hair more solvent than I do, but doing much better than many.
If you’re swishing it around in a vat first, then that ratio sounds implausible to me. Even with hammer milled material. You need almost a gal of ethanol to cover a single lb of 1/4” material in a bucket (mixing tank). The ratio you are suggesting would not submerge the biomass.
So my guess is you ARE using 3gal per lb.
The prototype (2lb) unit my current project is based on was achieving 95+% extraction efficiency in 6min total cycle. The 10lb unit I cobbled together to duplicate that was only doing 85% when I tested it…but I’ve got the right tooling to tune the big one where ever makes sense.
The more solvent you use the more you need to recover.
Got a video of your current loading and unloading process? I’ll take a look.
Are you talking on loading the mixer and unloading jt?
@dirteagle was offering me assistance with the care and feeding of my canoe (centrifuge).
…and provided exactly the paddle (
) I needed via DM. 
You can always call into us here at Vincent. Rob is in Alabama working on a turn key we designed.
What RPM or HZ are you running at on the VFD we sent you?
(813) 248-2650 Savino or myself can help you.
Need to give a shout out to @MattVincentCorp for awesome display of customer service, he got ahold of me directly after reading this posting and was extremely helpful in giving me a few tips to hopefully help our process get to where we need it to be. Excellent guy and excellent company
can I ask (again) how big is that tank you’re throwing 500-750lb of biomass into?
I’m still not convinced that the solvent to biomass ratio you’ve given us is correct.
1500lb of ethanol is ~220gal.
I could never get more than 15lb of biomass mixed into a slurry in a 15 gal keg (with ~12 gal of ethanol)…the concept that you’re managing more than 3X that ratio and pumping it from your vat into a screw press seems unlikely.
I may have misspoke previously. We are pressing the biomass twice per run. So for 500 lbs of biomass the first run is 1.5 to 1 so roughly 110 gallons eth. Second run is about .5 to 1 so roughly 36 gallons. About 150 gallons eth total for the whole batch pressed twice.
But I am also not convinced it is right, thats why I asked haha. Thanks for continuing the discussion though, any knowledge that can be thrown my way is much appreciated!!
Heat jacketed screw conveyor with a condenser
We are actually in the process of building a fully sealed jacketed drag conveyor at the moment. Basically along those lines but just not a screw style.
nah, even having seen a solution very similar to yours, I was stuck on pumping a slurry rather than using a (screw/drag) conveyor to get the job done. Which probably has more to do with the problem I’m currently trying to solve (note to self: screw it!)
After extraction is over, run live steam using a steam generator through the spent. Set up a cold trap to collect the ethanol solvent. The ethanol may loose its purity, but you benefit from recovery. The ethanol may be stripped of moisture by various methods.
What sort of suggestions would you have for inline scrubbing of this vapor stream before it hits cold trap?
If steam is to be avoided, you can use Nitrogen. I do not understand your scrubbing question well. Can you elaborate?
We have a CP 6 from Vincent Corp, Rob told me doing 2 lbs ETOH to 1 lbs hemp typically leaves around 1-1.5% cannabinoids in the spent, 3 lbs ETOH to 1 lbs hemp leaves 0.8% or less. Ive landed on 2-1 and dont care about the 1% lost. Works great. But switching to decanting centrifuge 
Sorry for the long absence. With a VincentCorp press you will get a decent % of particles in the 1-15 micron size. Especially if you’re running biomass that’s been sitting around for a year.
So, when you put into a unit that’s going to boil off the ethanol for porting and condensing,… Well theae super fine particles will float up with the vapor. Sure you could probably bag filter after condensing, but I’m more interested in scrubbing that vapor. A cyclone would do a good job down to let’s say 25-50 micron… But that doesnt truly solve the problem. Any clever ideas??
Why not filter on the inlet to solvent recovery? Generally that’s a pretty good idea to begin with