I wasn’t speaking on the automation standpoint. The context of the statement was that his hour per year projection is skewed because you still need people there to switch out bags and run the machine.
I know there’s plenty of people that dumped 400k into a Luna and love to throw around the amount labor is saving them and ignore the fact that it’s lack of throughput compared to other machines for the same price far outpaces what they’ll save in labor but as I said, glad you all are happy. I stand by what I said.
I love the fact that it eliminates a bunch of mundane labor. No standing and staring and watching and waiting and turning valves at the right time, etc.
My main operator is on vacation and I grabbed one of my lab techs and he and I ran 180 lb of fresh frozen yesterday from 8-3.
We just dicked off most of the day, made a badass lunch, smoked a bunch of weed on our breaks, I took some meetings and phone calls and we were done by 4.
How is it skewed? You just literally suck at reading comprehension. Do I really need to quote my post again?
When someone isnt attending to the luna they are still here working on other tasks that make the labs money from other avenues. My post pretty clearly said on average the luna only needs to be attended to for 2 hours a day. The other 6 hours can be spent on tasks that do not involve the luna at all. and attending to the luna throughout the day consists of waiting for the green light to flash so we can pour or swap bags. That is literally it.
How long ago was the luna you ran built? what lab was it at Tos Mos? ? I’d wager you are talking shit about a system that has been vastly redesigned and improved multiple times.
Idk I didn’t realize it took several people to tend to a lab. I run 60 lbs a day by myself, packing bags, tending to the ovens, even weighing out lbs. our system didn’t cost anywhere near 100k (not talking about the machine I built that does 300-600 lbs a shift) but if you’re gonna pay an extractor, let them earn their money extracting. Get them a machine that makes them hustle and puts out 20-30 lbs a day. 60-75 lbs a day was a good option 3-4 years ago I’ll admit. But these days, there’s far better options and I think what the Luna lacks in throughout is not nearly cost effective compared to the money you save on labor (as I’ve said multiple times now)
I didn’t run the lab at tos mos but I know who they are. I’ve ran the one that they use for a show piece in Hubbard and modified it heavily because it also does a hot vapor push which I think was also very cool 3-4 years ago but not so much anymore.
I agree with everything sk8midget said, except this part
If the operator is paid 30 and the wook is paid 15, and there’s 2080 hours in a week, the math can be (2080 x 30) plus (2080 x 15) but not adding the hours(4160) AND the dollars(45) because @ $45 you’re adding both salaries for the year which is 2080.
Still a helluva savings per year, and it’s sick for them to be able to do r&d
I’ve heard a lot of bad things about lunas, and folks talking about essentially paying for the privilege of doing R&D to help Luna finalize an incomplete product. Too lazy to search, but there’s a few people on here that don’t have great things to say about them.
I wouldn’t buy one based on that. If I were in charge of purchasing, I might wait 5 years and see if they’ve hammered out the bullshit. I don’t really wanna do R&D unless it’s my system, or I’m getting a hefty discount for the value they get from me running it.
Most of the time I think you can just buy it outright and cut ties. I know at least one group that financed it and had to help with r and d stuff and also let people come check it out when people were interested in buying them.
Personally I think it could be a good system if they built in an ffe so it could go through more weight. There’s a couple other extraction things I’d change about it. I just feel like it was a good layout years ago and they haven’t really kept up with modern extraction technology and focus more on sales and automation.
It would be relatively easy to add a falling film column to the Luna. A 6x48 jacketed column tied into the existing heat system would be cool. If you had enough headroom you could even double it.
Adding a tube and shell would be easy. But you’d need vastly different heaters and chillers than what comes up on the lunatech. About 7kw of cooling per lb/min. You’d need about 30kw of cooling and 15-20kw of heat
You’d also need a chimney and second tube and shell for the vapor to move into a condensing surface. You’d basically just delete the entire existing collection pot and replace it with an ffe. Could be done with the existing computer program safely if you have a manual ball valve in place to regulate flow so you’re not generating too much vapor and creating a tremendous amount of pressure
I was actually in the process of r and d this exact thing and was considering pitching it to jack naito with the group I was working with that had the lunatech but had some issues with the group and had to opportunity to build it in a different asme shop, which is the 300-600 lbs per shift unit I posted earlier on this thread
I was thinking more of a hybrid design that would fit in the existing programming and wouldn’t need major modifications, just a few fittings, some hoses, and a jacketed column.
Pushing all that vapor through the condenser currently on it won’t work well even with a badass chiller. It would need a lot more condensing surface area, bigger chiller and bigger heater. Without a chimney and second tube and shell, you’d be recovering at really high pressures and without a manual ball valve you’d have no way to dial in the flow to your evaporative and condensing ability which would be pretty dangerous. Having bigger vapor and condensing pathways allows the system to operate at low pressure which is what’s needed to keep your evaporation effective. Pressure increases boiling points so if you create too much pressure and don’t move it, there’s no point
Oh, I wouldn’t plan to try and recover a ton of gas while draining the reactor, just enough to shave off some recovery time, nothing drastic that would give me pressure concerns. The heat source is only 5kw.
5kw isn’t much for sure. You might get a little better results but imo the only reason you’d add an ffe is to eliminate recovery times completely. Your only bottle neck is injection. So as long as it takes to inject is how long your run is to a finished product. It would also be a lot faster if you had a secondary transfer pot to drain the reactor into. You’d run your reactor into the pot, start the recovery through ffe, unload the reactor and load it with new bag, fill it and as soon as the second transfer tank is empty or can fit another reactor worth of solvent, drain reactor into transfer tank and run through ffe. If it did that, you could go through probably 250-350 lbs a day of biomass. About double if it’s ff