Quick survey. Dry ice vs chiller

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So I’m in the process of looking for a chiller, I have found a couple in my price range reaching -40c. A friend tells me not to invest, but to run dry ice because my product will ultimately be better the colder it is. (Dry ice gets up to ~-80c with iso)

What is everyone else’s opinion? Is there going to be a noticeable difference from -40c chiller & jacketed column, to just a sleeved column fed with dry ice? The purpose is dewaxing in an inline column.

Any response is appreciated. Much love to the community.

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You can get away with dry ice and no chiller, it really just depends on your scale. How much are you looking to be processing at a time?

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For a larger scale facility, I recommend searching for a chiller that can at least hold to -60C and/or use liquid nitrogen jackets for your tanks to help support that hold. Otherwise dry ice can be extremely effective for getting temps down quick with smaller batches

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Not much. Currently dewaxing a 3x36 out of a 3x24 material

Ultimately once I got on this path ive come to realize I went too small. But. It’s a place to start. Upgrading spools is the easy part.

The feed back already has me in the direction of dry ice, I heard the same about -60 or below but ultimately -80 or below. I have an HVAC guy (whom i don’t trust a TON due to personal history) who is looking into a diy chiller to hit -80 for me. I’ve been meaning to send over the threads on here to him, but he is simply just slow when it comes to side gigs.

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A diy chiller to hit -80? I wonder if your buddy is willing to share those plans, I gotta guess he isnt talking about rigging up a mini split. :grin:

Reaching -80 using dry ice requires a lot of dry ice. I couldnt say exactly how much but someone around here (probably @Lincoln20XX or @cyclopath ) worked out the problem thermodynamically.

Two other options for cooling that can be utilized in a way similar to dry ice would be liquid CO2 or liquid N2 both of which will transfer heat better than dry ice.

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if you’re trying to cool low enough to dewax in a column I would definitely stick with dry ice.

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Thank you everybody very much. So a -80c DIY glycol chiller is out of the question?

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Pretty sure I did at one point. Don’t have the calcs on hand. Mostly because I ran them at one point and then compared to the relative cost/pain in the ass factor for dry ice vs nearly anything else - LN2, CO2, glycol, physics trickery - glycol type chillers came out on top for us.

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