Hello,
We want to make one FFE, anyone know someone who could help with
calculations necessary to produce from start. We talking about 200l per hour. Everything dimensions, vaccum, temperature, KW, everything .
Your better of buying a China rig
By cema instruments and add
Pumps and a nozzel
Buy your own heating and cooling equipment
We are welder fabricators in the design process. We are going to build a extraction process
Welcome
Where are you located ?
Poland, i want to produce all stuff for my own. I started with chiller to froze 250 liter of ethanol for 1-2 hours to - 60 . Its almost finish. Then i will work with ffe. Maybe at The beginning i will buy thin tubes (fawires) becouse I have problem with buy it with Good Technology in Poland and i dont know right dimencions.
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(Pics are in reverse order)
Heres an update on the FFE i made. Ive got it going up to 22 gallons/hr on a 140F ondemand heater circulating at 3gpm. Right now the circulation of my heating solution and my spray nozzle are my bottlenecks im working on now.
Using the first exchanger on the cooling side to preheat incoming ethanol is the bees knees. It takes -50C tincture to 80F running at 20gal/hr. It brings room temp tincture up to 97F running at 20gal/hr. Propane cost is about a nickle/hr and im using well water for cooling.
Im very happy as it is atm though.
Im using a needle valve to control flow and suprisingly is really accurate when u keep a steady vac. I can turn it half open and it goes 10gph, 1 full turn is 20gph. I verify with a neat sensor that doesnt contact the liquid and can tell me inline temp aswell as flow speed
I use a sousvide /submerisble pump setup for the jaacket of the collection vessel and i can heat the remaining ethanol out just to reduce the time i need to rotovape.
I plan on plumbing the outlet right to the roto so i can get the process going faster. I got a 15 foot silicone line going its pretty funny
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Looks like you’re getting there! What’s the BTU rating on your heater? And why did you add the sous vide component to heat the collection vessel instead of connecting it in with the heat for the evap column?
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200k btu, its definitly overpowered, just need to get the liquid circulating faster. Its the takagi 540p model, i originally had another 540p model that went up to 160f but it was messed up, didnt regulate the propane properly and burnt it out. I got this one to replace, same model number just this one is limited to 140f for some reason.
I wanted to keep the collection seperate because i didnt want the tincture sitting in 140f. I have the sous vide set to 36C, so that the tincture only sees high heat for thr shortest time possible. And from my own experiments i found 36c to be a good limit when trying to retain the acidic cannabinoids and terps
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Right on. You might want to explore using a hot water storage tank as a buffer for the hot water circulation. Are you limited to 60C on the heater?
Yes im limited to 140F. I dont think its the heating that needs to be improved, i think its the circulation. Im getting a 30f delta between inlet and outlet when going 20+gph and no matter what the heater puts out 140f. The heater can handle 10gpm ciruclation, so im going to get that going closer to 8gpm and ill report back
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Sometimes tubeing bundles get cold spots, this can happen because of a couple of things.
If the tubes are too closely spaced you can have issues with the water flowing through the tube bundle/ thermo mass in the evaporator. The way to solve this is to incorporate baffles along the tube bundle to premote flow through the tight spots. Either that or build it with less tubes.
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mines got 4 baffles in each column just makes it go in a zigzag like pattern.
Having baffles also slows your flow too
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I like to do the ones we make like a spiral staircase, plus it looks cool and the fabricator bitches more! 
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She is a work of art.
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What pump are you using for the hot water heater?
Two grundfos ups15 circulation pumps, i think they are 1/25 hp each. Id suggest maybe two 1/10 hp pumps
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I’m betting your tankless is restricting flow due to water input temperatures. This was the issue I had a few years ago when I had it for my shatter platter. Hotter the input the less flow you will have. This was an also issue I told my old work. They were backpressuring the taco pump from the restrictive flow. They always wandered why they kept going out.
You need another heat exchanger to bring down the temps before the water is recirculated. I drew a PID and posted it somewhere on here for running control feedback instrumentations. @AutomationGuy has a better understanding than I have with running these automated systems. I know they a have thread floating around here with specs on how to hook them up correctly.
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In that case i should see a spike in flow when im running it really fast. When im pushing 25gal/hr, its going back in the heater at 110F, but i see no difference in flow when it returns at 140f or 110f, its most always at 2-2.5gpm except for when the system is cold and starting up then the flow is closer to 1.8gpm but quickly hits its regular 2-2.5 gpm
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