I’m talking to a friend of mine who says that a hydraulic cylinder is going to be fine for our first few pounds of biomass to reclaim our ethanol after cold washing, and after reading that many of you are centrifuging at large scale, it got me wondering, at what point does it become worth it to bother centrifuging up to code?
On that note, would it be possible to just jam our biomass into a decent sized buchner funnel and just rip out the leftover ethanol into a vacuum flask? Is there a reason that people aren’t doing that aside from it not scaling well?
Vacuuming ethanol will evaporate more than you’ll recover and would be hard on your pump because of this. You could try positive pressure, like nitrogen, but really that isn’t going to work as well either.
Are you talking about a centrifuge that you fill with solvent or a centrifuge meant purely to pull additional solvent from your material?
Primarily for pulling additional solvent, like a panda that I hear so much about.
@squig I’m okay with less than 100% recovery at this point, at least until I’m at higher scale. Rather than using an aspirator, can I just get away with using a cold trap?
We have tried the whole press thang. IMO it’s not as good as centrifugal force. We were using a VERY over engendered “press” from TLS and the amount of solvent that was left in the biomass was atrocious. It was air assisted and some kinda 20 ton press or something still wasnt enough. Panda or screw press will do you a lot better
Shockingly cheap, can serve as both a soak tank and also initial separation of solids from tincture with auto-dispensing mechanism. Dispense solids into screw press for further recovery. I think this would beat the pants off a centrifuge in cost-effectiveness if it was dialed in. 10000 lb capacity is considered medium-small by their standards.
The issue with pressing is the other junk you squish out. A homemade expeller press is actually pretty effective at removing your solvent, especially for the budget of $1-300 though
True. I think at a certain point though you just need to accept that. I think the whole cryo-centrifuge approach is limited to a very narrow range of production capacities. And people persevere in that approach and end up in a silly situation where their employees are running around filling up 10 centrifuges. Better to use dirty extraction if it’s scalable, as long as the needed post processing is also scalable.
I went through the bucket tek thread, great stuff, and I saw that a lot of people are using pandas and washing machines, and unfortunately the position I’m in is that I’m trying to get licensed so I don’t think they’ll be to code for processing solvents. I think eventually I’ll be in centrifuge territory but for now I could only process 600kg a year anyhow. Thank you for the link regardless.
Absolutely agree. I think the cryo fuge method is only one of 100 good ways to skin the cat but is so popular because it’s now a well established method. The larger the scale, the more steps can be afforded to improve cost:output efficiency and like I’ve harped on enough here already, cooling process to -80 is very hard on variable cost
Yes, I have. Very good inline with screw presses in a large-scale etOH extraction system. You must replace the gaskets and seals with material designed for 190 proof etOH; the prefabbed seals of this unit are designed for 20% etOH concentrations and if you run regular extraction contents through… your seals will pop and the bladder of the pneumatic wine press will eventually fail.