Hey yall, been looking around but figured id ask, anyone have suggested company or machine to reproof roughly 5000 gallons of ethanol in a 7 day time period?
We sell large and small ethanol distillation units! Let me know if you are interested!
1 Like
awesome! i sent you guys an inquiry form and will follow up with a call tomorrow. Thanks!
Following because I’m interested to see what you end up doing. Distilling 5000 gal a week or 710 gals a day seems like a hell of a time and energy investment compared with more passive methods like flowing your diluted ethanol thru moly sieve or a water absorbent salt
1 Like
Honestly didn’t think the moler sieve could keep up with that. Is there a limit to what moler sieves can handle as far as like not needing an entire separate building for moler sieving lol
I’m not sure, my experience with molecular sieves is limited to butane extraction and far, far smaller amounts of solvent than 5000 gal a week.
I did google a bit because I was curious, from this source: molecular sieves and absorbtion capabilities , Hive Chemistry Discourse
Says that 100 lbs of 3A molecular sieve (the kind compatible with stripping water from ethanol) can hold 20-23 lbs of water at 25*C
We would need to know how much water your alcohol is picking up and to what proof you wish to restore it in order to estimate how much molecular sieve you would need to do your 5000 gal a week.
Of course next concern is going to be handling and dewatering hundreds of pounds of molecular sieve at a time. Definitely aren’t going to fit much in an AI vacuum oven LOL
do you have any waste steam you could use to help heat a ffe or at least pre heat your product? How about waste water streams? you got any extra for cooling. You will need to optimize all the energy you have availible to power this beast!
2 Likes
Well the ethanol in my experience comes back out around 175-180 proof. So we’d need to bring it back to atleast 190 proof if not 195 proof. So like 15% water content by weight. Using roughly 800 gallons a day with a loss of like 10% alcohol would mean we have 720 gallons we need to pull 10-15% water out of so like 70-100 gallons of water to remove. Jesus Christ this project has so many headaches lmao
1 Like
Some assumptions:
Water weights 8.34 lbs/gal
For simplicity we’ll say 100 lbs will remove 2.75 gallons
That says you need to have 100 lbs x 70/2.75 = 2500 lbs moly sieve on the low end
100 lbs x 100/2.75 = 3600 lbs moly sieve on the high end
Double those numbers so that you can be dewatering one set while the other is absorbing
Plus factor costs of a couple of jacketed reactors you can heat and pull vacuum on large enough to hold that much moly sieve.
“if it was simple anyone could do it”
1 Like
That’s what we use to dry our compressed air. Alternating columns while one is drying the air the other is regenerating. I don’t know how well it work work with several tons at a time. Probably have to break it up into two sets of cannisters rather than just two batches. They have to be pretty hot to regenerate and for a good while. Plus you have to let them cool because I’m pretty sure the adsorption reaction is exothermic.
So then would that be time efficient/cost efficient to use sieves or a still? Probably still sieves if huh? So just need a large column that can be heated and vacuumed down?
we have a number of machines that can do this. They are designed for bulk scale and are heavy duty units that do not require a lot of attention and are someone what self running. we can also offer training and demo on these units. we can set up operating instruction based upon your needs and the profile of your material. we can also run lab samples in our lab to design the optimal purification method for your product
1 Like
Yes there is a limit for 4 angstrom sieves but you can dry them.
Be careful because sieves consume water exothermically (produce lots of heat) called heat of absorption i think. Also i suppose this only really happens if the sieves are too big if its water you seek to trap 3A is great and 4A works too.
I would not suggest buying the cheapest ones you can find. Also make sure to dry them before you use them
2 Likes
Just a heads up, distillation is a good way to do that but it is illegal if you have not paid uncle sam his sin tax for the stuff. (Ie buy denatured ethanol and distill out the denaturing agent)
READ THIS PAPER
message me if you have questions
1 Like
When using denatured heptane has higher boiling point than ethanol. So only way to get rid of it would be in decarbing… heptane is about 208f ethanol flows @ 167/169f beautiful flow.
Decarbing ethanol?
3 Likes
We can run tests under multiple parameters with membranes for reproofing. However, it’s rare to pick up more water than ethanol lost in most extractions of dry biomass. You can add appropriate amounts of 200 proof alcohol and water to top off your solvent tank and adjust your solvent to your desired alcohol purity.
3 Likes
when getting crude from the ethanol in evaporator. Once all ethanol evaporated off then you decarb for hours that’s the only way that the heptane would be cooked off.
do you have analytics behind that statement?
there are absolutely other ways of skinning that cat.
vacuum can certainly be used to reduce the boiling point of heptane to well below the temperatures required for decarb.
https://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?ID=C142825&Mask=4&Type=ANTOINE&Plot=on#ANTOINE
That’s what we’re trying to figure out now! I went from being a welder to fixing what a so called process chemist thought he knew. @ 167/168f no vacuum only time we pull a vacuum is in small reactor. Then @ 122f we pull -15/20 vacuum until most ethanol evaporated then decarb. Sorry if not so clear guys all new to me!