richard1

For me the interesting part was starting from 16% and maintaining the 96% until tails.

@GENIO I had 2 observations.  1.  You've changed your packing from those crazy flimsy thin SPP wire diameters to something more substantial Helical Coil Packing, say Diam 0.9x Diam 10 x 10          and 2. you were running with quite high power at 12 KW.

You're splitting the infinitive.  No one expects production distillate during heat up nor stabilisation periods.

Really !!!!

Sorry I am out of here.  I asked an honest question.

Cheers.

12 hours ago, Moonshiner11 said:

No. If you dont believe me. Watch the silicone gaskets in these Chinese stills. After a handful of runs they are half dissolved.  Silicone has never been the correct choice, it's only been allowed because it's cheaper for suppliers. 

Chinese quality is at best dubious.  Proper qualitative food grade material supply yields the correct result.

I am not going pee on anyone's parade here other than to comment on the later thread of the post purely because it's of current interest to me and that is use of an E-Stop .....EMERGENCY STOP.

Use of an E-Stop has merits and in my system I have linked it only to the VSD for the agitator and the phase angle relay / power regulator for the 3 phase heating elements.  Nothing more because I further need the PLC to initiate shut down when the E-Stop is pressed.

So to the basis of the post.  My EStop is directly mounted with an HMI on the still.  It is further connected through an isolation barrier on the way to the PLC.  The PLC with control instrumentation and related power control are mounted  in seperate panels +- 5m (20') away from the still.  The intent here is to consider aspects of Atex / Ex requirements.

So I ask because I in general never see it being done. ..... How many people make use of Ex rated instrumentation and isolation barriers for distilling. ?????  Suppliers thump their chest saying Nema 4 enclosures etc. but are never further compliant. !!!

EPDM … (ethylene-propylene diene monomer).   Yes, the gasket material between the clamped tri-clover ferrules.

Sorry @bluestar .  EPDM is the solution and is the best to use.   Ensure that you have food-grade EPDM.

I suspect that Nitryle / NBR has been used coupled with a possible Chinese supply which at best is dubious.

Try select reputable supplier options e.g. Kieselmann etc.

I have recently gone through this exercise.  I have 7 temperature probes in my boiler and column and had initially designed on standard PT100's with 4-20mA PUKS and this all feeding into my PLC.

With peer review it was suggested to not bugger around and rather do it properly with Ex requirements.  The cost of this is obviously huge especially if you consider additional level switches and pressure transmitters also both with Ex requirements.

So for temperature, I have used Ex rated 4-20mA PUKS as well as Ex rated 4-20mA isolation barriers.  In hind sight I wish I had gone the route as Silk has mentioned, RTD's with Ex isolation barriers.

But what gets me is that not everyone does this.  Some still suppliers offer this as an optional extra.

It sounds like one of STILLDRAGON's gaskets.  Contact them.

Don't like the look of the glass on the left.  No character.

Word of caution.  Stay away from wound filters.  Desperately cheap and hopelessly inefficient

I agree.  I think that this is misconstrued because tables are at 20 deg C

Very interesting read.  No I didn't realise the differance in US electrics from ours other than frequency and voltage.

In the heat element connection above from southernhighlander, ...... Very nice picture.

But the first connection, STAR-DELTA is missing its neutral connection.

The 4 small grey parts to the right of the overload devices are fast blow fuses (glass).  I suspect that ... they are wired to lights on panel door front (from a phase of each of the 24V coil contactors).  On panel door there must be a switch to bring these contactors in.

Wired line to neutral for 3 phase for each heating element, the current draw is 11.8A .

Have you considered, 1.  Modifying your agitator to come in at an offset and angled towards the centre bottom and 2.  Using a VSD to increase your speed.  Currently you are rotating at 24 RPM.

Not knowing any better I would rather make this from glass as it would be substantially more hygienic and easier to both clean and sterilise.

2 hours ago, adamOVD said:

I'm thinking of just buying a stainless filter which I imagine would last forever as long as you keep cleaning it, and replace the gaskets. I would also be less worried about flavors leaching over from the filter from different products.

SS filters are very expensive, have low flow rate, high delta P, low dirt holding capability and finally just don't have the comparative filtration efficiency.  All round a bad choice.

Piston compressors are bad news with respect to oil carry over.  Coalescing filters do a sort of ok job here but not perfect.   I have lost a lot of pneumatic solenoid valves due to oil even though coalescing filters are installed.  Now imagine if you are blowing the bottle out with air and you have an amount of oil to contend with.

Two things, your compressor needs to be of screw oil free type and with respect to filters they need to be multi stage coalescers where you aim for oil and particle removal.

9 minutes ago, Southernhighlander said:

Another is that I have figured out a way to get free shipping on all of my sanitary parts and components which means I can sell them at a lower cost than my competitors with better quality.

Nice to know that there is better quality around …………….

Looks great BUT...… you are now using instrumentation and PLC control.  And the BUT part is that these are not Ex / Atex certified within your system when you do this.  So how are you getting around this.

Personally I love the automation part.  Would love to know the answer to the above.

15 minutes ago, MG Thermal Consulting said:

As long as manufacturers live up to warranties and performances, that's the end of the conversation between supplier and user.

 

+1 for that.  Generally when I design, I allow for +20% at least FOS.  The last thing that I ever want is where customers come back to me and say whatever ........

In my kegging plant which we design and build and further which is highly automated and technically advanced ..... the bloody plant just goes on and on and on and at some point I need to tell the customer that I need to break the plant because I need to earn some call out money.  But more importantly so, I supply the plant up into Africa and travelling out there is expensive and so it needs to be bullet proof.