I have a line that goes from the gas side of my solvent tank to a manifold, and the manifold also has my recovery pumps hooked up to it.
How efficient is recycling the vapors?
Im operating at 50 psi. I feel like if i slightly crack the valve to recycle, I could lower my psi and simultanously make more room for solvent thats being recovered . I could also crack it open in intervals…
Is this a waste of energy or is it saving energy (making my pump work less) Im sure there are a lot of factors such as room temp and solvent (butane).
I find recycling vapor to be most useful if you need to drop your pressure in a hurry. Say, for example, you’re in the middle of doing runs and you realize your ice bath for your condensing coil or heat exchanger has melted and gotten warm. You can ice it heavily, and then open that vapor recycler full stop to drop your pressure back down to a reasonable level.
I have also seen some people “charge up” pressure in their recovery tank by recovering butane with no chilling so as to get more pressure to do a faster liquid dump or get a better fill-and-soak. Then, after doing this, you can recycle vapor to manually drop your pressure back down once you start chilling solvent for the main recovery portion.
I find it works even better if you have two pumps, and you can isolate one pump to recycle vapor only while the other one is recovering normally.
Thanks for posting this, I was running into a similar issue this week, and have been doing as much time data as possible to see what is most efficient. If i come up with anything I’ll post.
Best is to have a condenser after the pump before the tank. Imagine a distillation appearatus without a condenser, that is the sorry state of most cls I see out there.