Polyscience Immersion Coil for CLS Recovery?

Part of the reasoning behind joining these threads…:shushing_face:

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Let me try to see if I can make it simple.

Heat equals energy.
Energy in a system will always seek entropy/equilibrium, as such if you put more energy in one side of a system it will in time transfer energy/equilibrate with the other side of the system giving the system the sume energy dispersed equally throughout the system, and so what you are doing is taking energy out of one side and putting it into the other. In this case, moving energy from your butane to your fluid surrounding your coil. Refrigeration compressor works on the rule that when things expand they cool down/lose energy. Refrigeration compressors have different capacity to “soak up” energy (which is how you get the power rating). Different gases used in refrigeration cool down to a different temperature when expended (which is how you get refrigeration systems that are rated for different temperatures (but that’s not the whole story because when you want to go below a certain temperature you run into a Cascade system which is a system by which you first cool one gas that will aid in another system cooling a deferent gas to even a colder temperature)). And so now you have to figure out to what temperature you want to lower your solution that you put your coil into and then you have to figure out at what rate are you going to transfer energy into it which will tell you how much energy you have to use to soak up the heat you you are trying to dissipate.

But also there is another solution you can think about. Instead of trying to deal with all that energy at one time you can make yourself a “negative energy battery”. What I mean is get a container that is insulated well enough to where it will not exchange heat efficiently (well insulated) make it large enough and cool it over a much larger period (over night) which will enable you to use a refrigeration system with much smaller capacity.

I haven’t had my cup of coffee yet so I’m sorry if I’m sounding like an idiot. So if I’m incoherent about any of this please point it out and I’ll try to be a bit more coherent.

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We ordered an extra compressor because of past issues and checked the pressure on the refrigerant (and maybe topped it off) before putting it in service. Haven’t had to replace it yet. The 100 liter reservoir minimize temperature fluctuations, which in my experience, greatly reduces the lifetime of cascading chillers. We also blow it out monthly and keep it in a cooled room. I consider it an upgrade from the Huber 390w we used before it.

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1 lb of dry ice can remove about 275btu/lb as it sublimates.

With good insulation in a cool room you probably only lose about 10% of that efficiency. So you can get about 245btu/lb of dry ice.

So about 3 lb butane condensed for every 2 lb of dry ice that sublimes.

If you’re trying to condense around 300 lb of butane throughout your day you’ll need at least 200 lb a day just for condensing, then you add in things like pre-chilling and rechilling your solvent, and column recovery if you’re running it and you get closer to 300-400 depending on efficiency and speed.

Part of utilizing your dry ice efficiently is making recovery fast. Get yourself a good 3+ kw/h of heat input on a high speed pump and watch dry ice vanish as your recovery times drop; vapor path permitting.

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If you only kind of understand what it takes to condense butane, you might should reconsider this hobby. Or at least do some more homework.

Have you run across this?

Do you understand it?

All you need is to condense your butane.

If you only have 25C water for cooling, what pressure would you need to condense your solvent?

That’s why some use pumps…

Edit: 1bar == 14.5psi

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Using the same diagram, how hot does your pot need to be before the PRV (should) let go?

This critter would likely get you down into the -40C range if you insulate and are patient.

Or hit up @enjoyextra

these seem to have an appropriate amount of cooling power.

Doubt they make any sense in your world…

Didn’t read all if it but the immersion probe 1000% cannot handle recovery to any worth while degree. Tried all gases, it has no power when cold, loved it for cold traps but thats all it was good for. That and if you wanna drop the temp on a few gallons of something real quick

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Crazy that you have to pay $2/w for a chiller in 120v. That 50/40 looks nice. 10kw for about $10k.

The other thing to keep in mind is electricity requirements. Anything above usually 1.5kw is going to require you hook up to 220v, like your dryer, and you’ll have to have proper wiring, and breakers, to handle whatever load you choose.

Over I think 9kw, please correct me if I’m wrong, you have to start running on 3 phase electric, which is pretty much only available to commercial clients. Like for instance that 50/40 @cyclopath posted up for you.

Just some other caveats to consider. Oh yeah, and I’ve heard they need pretty regular maintenance. :wink:

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Oops!

Also if you’re looking to do something on the cheap then you should look into converting a drum or two into a chiller that would be able to handle what you’re looking to do with it a window AC unit (depending on how many BTU unit you use and how many AC unit is).

I think I seen somebody here talk about it showing pictures how he did it (pretty damn cool if you ask me)

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Start here: DIY Inexpensive Chiller

Probably need to follow some of the links too

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Just keep in ming… even for the diy route you will be limited by your electrical capabilities. 1.5kw is going to be the limit on 120v no matter how you come at it.

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That’s not true bro. 15 amps at 120 volts is 1800 watts 20 amps at 120 volts is 2400 Watts and you can easily connect 2 ton (24,000 BTU) AC system and if you want to you can run a second circuit and run a second one off of the normal electric lines that comes into your house.

You can use a 55 gallon drum or even if you want something bigger you can get one of those metal horse troughs that looks like a big bathtub build a box bigger than it put down three or four inches of insulation foam on the bottom wait for it to dry put your container in and fill the space all between the container and the box with more insulation foam let it dry put the refrigeration system condenser coil/coils into your container that you built you can make your butane condenser coil really large for maximum heat exchange area to fit inside of your container make a good insulating lid with appropriate holes for all of your lines fill it up with whatever thermofluid you want plug it in wait overnight and now you have 55 gallons to 200 gallons or more reservoir at -20°c ready to soak in a lot of heat and at the same time have 24,000 to maybe 48,000 BTU of on hand cooling capacity on top of it. All of that from your normal 120v home electric lines

Edit: after looking into it again it’s possible that i was wrong about the maximum size AC that they make for a 120volt. the maximum BTU AC that I found just now for 120volts is 12,000 BTU (1ton) . But you can still make it work

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Thank you very much for sharing!We have many kinds of models for choose.

Okay. So that was a good read this afternoon between other things.

I’m sitting here going, how in the fuck can you have something be >100% efficient? You can’t just make 900w be 12k btu/h, right? I also learned I was referencing these units all wrong lol

Short answer. You can’t.

Long answer, CoP.

“However, this does not mean that they are more than 100% efficient, in other words, no heat engine can have a thermal efficiency of 100% or greater.”

I kept thinking it had to have something to do with the temperature differences at input and output, or maybe it was going to be related to the size of a room.

“The COP is highly dependent on operating conditions, especially absolute temperature and relative temperature between sink and system, and is often graphed or averaged against expected conditions.”

It almost sounds like this would be a graph similar to what a chiller spec shows, but I wouldn’t know how to chart it. Suffice to say the amount of energy going into the system does not equal the amount of energy being removed. So, just because it says 12k btu/hr doesn’t mean it’ll be able to remove 12k btu/hr at say -20°F.

Still kinda struggling with the details, but that’s what I got from it. The other thing I’m not sure how to calculate is what I think would be referred to as the latent cooling capacity of your reservoir. I’m assuming it’s a heat capacity calculation.

More electrons requier more amps. The only way to get those electrons to the device is to increase the voltage :wink:

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I think everyone has to learn at some point. I am a computer programmer but I like doing this as a hobby so. Have I ran across it yes (the chart ), but dont I fully understand it, no but I can learn, thank you for your concern. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and willingness to teach the community and others such as myself. I have a lot of homework to do and more to learn. Form your explanation I can now understand the chart. my PRV limit is 125 psi ~8 bar
According to this at -50c with no added pressure butane would be in a liquid phase. That explains I do not need a 1 to 1 dry ice equivalent in terms of temp however a chiller that is colder than that needed -50c, can increase the recovery rate I assume. Thank you for pointing me at the tool needed chiller-wise.

Answer your question from earlier I can afford a chiller now that you point me in the right direction, i am also weight in maintanice and just faulty equipment as that can happened vs. just getting a dry chest and holding the dry ice myself. Yes, I have a recovery Pump Trs21 I have rebuilt it a couple of times and it still going strong. I will henceforth use C for temp and I didn’t understand the second part in regards to " I recommend grams, liters, and kg also gain real-world meanings for you". I will do some more reading on thermodynamics thank you.

thesk8nmidget I have a 100lb / 45kg tank which I only fill to 40lb / 18 kg of butane I try to do at least 4 to 5 extraction a day. I do a full wash so when I say that I just all the butane till the dip tube can not push up anymore with n2 assist (I didn’t know the dip tube didn’t like touch the bottom ).

cyclopath and everyone thank you, I do see, that yes,one can use a chiller on the jacket solvent tank and reduce pressures creating that vacuum and also use the condensing coil jackets to condense the butane and use dry ice but not needed but can help assist the process. As vortal has stated there is truly no replacing dry ice speed. I see that thank you for the lessons.

Sorry took so long to reply I am new and there is a limit to reply. Just for reference, I have always used dry ice, but due to the rainy season can’t do the extraction and I don’t want a delivery of dry ice to go to waste. so was thinking of a different solution. I think for now I will just purchase a Dry Ice Chest, and get the 500 lb of dry ice. I was previous doing a rental of the chest but my supplier didn’t like that I held it for 2 weeks due to the weather 300 bucks for 500lb of dry ice. Once I have learned more, I will look into the chiller this will also give me time to save up, as I don’t do this for profit currently it is a hobby.

cyclopath I do have a question about the flow rate now for the chiller. Let’s just say the Flow rate 20L/min if i have a 20L bucket i assume like cfm I and change that water each min. Trying to articulate this correctly were I am confused is how the flow rate affect the cooling. I assume if the flow rate is 1 to 1 then the energy efficiency would be 100 percent. If smaller the energy efficiency would be great then 100% and larger would decrease the efficiency is that correct?

Start here for chiller maths. The ULTIMATE chiller calculator thread

Don’t neglect the links below the first post.

As far as metric units having real world meanings, it’s mostly about the math. It’s often considerably easier.

The customer buys extracts by the gram. What sense does it make to track your inventory in anything other than kg?

Potency is returned in mg/g, sure you can use percent. What the fuck is 72% of a lb? 72% of a kg?

And butane goes below one bar(absolute) at ~0C.

Boiling point is the temp where vapor presser exceeds ambient (usually 1atm/1bar)…if you reduce pressure (pull vac), boiling point goes down.

Point is you can trivially put the genie back in the bottle (butane in your tank as a liquid) at 30C with that pump.

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The old joke: Welcome to the United States where the custies buy the gram and the dealer buys by the pound.