So I’ve recently been thinking to myself about building a still out of cls parts or something like that just for fun and because quarantine has me bored out of my skull
Then, I got to thinking why isn’t there a stainless steel rotovap? Then I got to thinking about how one of those would even work out to be functional.
So right now what I’ve been thinking is because the main thing that a rotovap provides is the rotational boiling flask as to provide a faster recovery than the traditional distillation of solvent; is how would I mimic that.
What I would do for a stainless rotovap is to use a cls base as a boiling flask. I figure the best way to mimic the spinning is to have something under the bottom of the base spinning in a counter clockwise motion.
Where I’m stumped with this is how would I make this happen.
Yeah. Whenever I think about optimization of roots it always brings me back to the falling film. The thing there is to figure out how to build one that doesn’t need industrial installation.
Well what I was thinking was maybe the heating element can have the motor to spin the base on the inside. Cause now I’m stuck in how I would get it to spin and heat at the same time. Maybe a digital heating mantle with a stainless steel plate disk that spins…
Maybe there could be a way to have a jacketed base designed with the jacket to be flooded from the bottom and maybe there could be a way to make it so that area where you would put the hoses for the water is also on a joint that makes it so that the base would spin but the other areas stay stationary so that you could have something spinning the base but have it so the water is heating the base at the same time…
Haha yeah ive thought of this too!
Ive got a whole page of designs that uses pretty much off the shelf parts. Just gotta custom make 2 or 3 pieces. But the stainless will allow u to jacket any chilling column, and throw way more spiral tubing down the middle of it.
Most of my designs resembled summits max roto,
The idea was to mount it to a skid, and make everythinh triclamped for easy swapping. I had a design with two roto balls going into one condenser tube that splits into two cooling chambers. With a dib tube going into each roto ball, so u can just close the valve to one and swap out the ball while its continously running with the other roto ball.
Well I wasn’t thinking about a motor lifting up the base and mimic the design of a rotovap entirely. That’s insane, not even I wanna attempt trying to make a device able to balance that much weight.
I think the jacketed base with the area where you plug in the water would be a good idea and have that on a spinning plate with a hole on the bottom.
Again having the parts to make the base rotational while keeping the rest stationary would be needed as well as figuring out a way to get that kind of a base fabricated.
Maybe just think vertical? Have your CLS bottom sit flat in a bucket of water with a souvide, fab an over head stirrer lid for it, attach hosing to your preffered condensation/collection vessel, voila.
