Who is king of EToH Recovery?

Unless you go with a simple pot still for recovery. Smearing is more of an issue when trying to make a neutral spirit in a reflux column. A pot still can just be cranked to 11 for stripping runs (or in our case, high volume etoh recovery).

@cyclopath Did you ever get to see that 100 gallon vacuum still in action? ~370 liters in “an hour or two” for 40k sounds like a hell of a deal.

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No. And holding my breath on that doesn’t seem to have been productive.

I’m not sure what the current snag is…

It’s no longer my problem, but I’m still trying to get them operational.

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NBOler system can run 225 L/hr (or faster), but a lot of that depends on the ancillary equipment used (heating/chilling), and matching nozzles/pressures to the desired through-put.

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I agree, most of what is currently available is “pilot scale” compared to other industries, though some of that seems to be based off volume of ethanol that can be stored on site / in the lab. As fire Marshalls allow larger scale labs, I see units scaling up to keep pace with increasing demand.

As for through-put, it seems like you really just need adequate residence time in the Falling Film to vaporize/evaporate the ethanol, and same with the condensing columns. I’m a mechanical engineer, so the Chemistry portion is a little past my limited Chem understanding, but from a Thermo perspective a well balanced system can hit the through-puts mentioned. NBOler has a system that has been hitting those numbers, and I believe go higher with higher capacity ancillary equipment.

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It is true we had a rusty heat exchanger on one unit, it was due to tooling being used on mild steel and then to clean the exchanger, coupled with the high humidity from the swamp cooler we were running in the summer aggrevated the rust. Our new AV30’s have heat exchangers made in the US by Apeks with Swagelok tubing. I’ll also note that we promptly swapped this unit out for said customer and they have been running 2 AV15’s for some time now with no issues.

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Awesome! Thanks for clearing that up. Glad to see you guys active here, there’s a lot of interest in your equipment

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Don’t you hate it when that happens?

Thanks for making good on it, and letting us know how it occurred.

It’s an easy miss when the shop is roiling like I imagine yours is at the moment :slight_smile:

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How to clean a heat exchanger… put in the dish washer

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Anyone here running one of the agile units in the wild? Or the Bizzy Bee FF? Yet to speak with anybody who is actually running one and they’ve been slow to return my DMs via IG.

Bizzy customer service is almost non existent. Agile is waiting on his psi review has one or two prototypes he has made

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Should be getting one of their bigger FFE’s shortly here. I can confirm that they are sometimes slow to return messages, from talking to Boris kinda sounds like they have a billion requests and orders to fill and not enough help to do it as timely as everyone would like. Which, sadly seems to be my experience with almost every industrial supplier I’ve done business with lately.

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With nanofiltration membranes you can do 500L/hr ethanol recovery at pricing close to Pinnacle’s offering. Highly recommend it for people operating at the larger size of production.

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Got more info on that or brands you like to use? Not familiar with the process or how it works

The only brand I know currently offering off the shelf engineered units is Ecosce (who full disclosure, I am currently doing outside sales for). The technology works by pressurizing the solution through a scroll membrane. The membrane has pore sizes on the nanometer scale, and the pores are small enough to allow ethanol molecules to pass through, but not cannabinoids. It then exudes the pure ethanol out through one channel, and a highly concentrated oil/solvent mix out another, which then gets finished in a rotavap or other suitable evaporator.

Since the main energy requirement is just a pump that generates the strong backing pressure, the utility expenses are also much lower than a system that has to evaporate and then chill all the solvent. The system also works with nonpolar solvents, and can get even higher throughput with those.

DM me if you’re interested in talking more about it.

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Have any real world experience with this? Any video of it working?

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We too would be interested in this…

found this, explains it a bit more in depth

I don’t have a video in operation right now but i’m trying to get one to show for you shortly here. Bear with me. There will also be a open facility starting in May and will be able to show much more detail then. This was also discussed in this earlier thread:

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Have anyone has any experience with NextGen HR600 or any NextGen solvent recovery system? How are they compare to FFE/RFE? I was told that they are more efficient and you can do decarb as well but i feel like there must be some trade-offs. We are doing hemp if that make any difference.

Very similar to the units by Maratek. They can indeed decarb but the trade off is they are usually slower when compared to same price FFE.