4" Crystal Dragon

Lloyd

Oh my, 9 of the 4" perforated plates in the meter long crystal dragon does not work very well. Some plates flooded while others refused to load.
Its not the downcomer, its a pressure build up problem.
8 plates, no.
7 plates, no.
6 plates and bammo, works perfectly.

FullySilenced

Photo's or movie please.. Please do not suggest it is a hole size issue.....

Moonshine

StillDragon - 4" Crystal Dragon - Testing 6 Perforated Plates

Watch @Lloyd test the 4" Crystal Dragon with a perforated plates setup!

http://youtu.be/hT8F-mS8_xE

RedDoorDistillery

From my experience with perf plates you need more power. You still have foam going on and not a fully stabilized plate. Perf plates load and balance different than bubble caps. In my experience when loading under full reflux you do get some plates that look flooded due to the foam that is occurring. More power and the plates stabilize from the bottom up after they are all loaded until all the plates look uniform. Pict 1 is what you have going now (Foam) pict 2 is a stabilized plate. Your bottom plate in the video looks almost right but the upper plates are still foaming.

It is kind of counter intuitive. The plates looks like it is flooding (Foam) but yet really you need more power and not less.

Looks like you are using 80% of your 6000w (4800w)

My guess based on your power use now is that you would need about 6200w to stabilize 6 plates. And you could probably run 9 plates with 9300 watts. But you may then see a problem with your downcomer not keeping up.

I would try to reduce the plates to 5 and then start at 5200watts and push up to your 6000w max. See if you can get the foam to go away on all the plates. And fully stabilize the plates. To confirm.

Lloyd

I have 3 each 2000 watt elements. One was plugged in and one on the controller and the other was disconnected. Total power input was not over 3kW with the controller at 80. The more heat I put at anything over 6 plates just made it worse. With only 6 plates I could easily put in more or less power and the column behaved in an orderly fashion.

Even at 4kW it behaved as it is supposed to, just had to increase the reflux.

We tried the same hole pattern with slightly larger holes and weeping and plate dumping was a serious issue.

211

Just watched the YouTube videos, really amazing watching plates fill one by one from top, so much clearer to see how a plated still really works. Can I request a video please? I would love to see it running with a see thru packed section if possible.

harley

Lower liquid level to 6-10 mm and try again with more power. Cheers

Lloyd

@harley said: Lower liquid level to 6-10 mm and try again with more power. Cheers

You mean the perf plates? I did that. Cut the downcomers and added more power. Only made matters worse.

@211 said: Just watched the YouTube videos, really amazing watching plates fill one by one from top, so much clearer to see how a plated still really works. Can I request a video please? I would love to see it running with a see thru packed section if possible.

I could do that. Not sure if you could see anything but it might be interesting. I have two 4" glass sections that are 700mm long each. But they won't survive shipping and if I film it I'm absolutely certain that people will want to order them. ++insert glass breaking emoticon here++

harley

1,5/1,6mm hole in 5mm pattern is working for many and give about 6,5-7% hole % of column size( almoust standard) and with 4mm pattern you have about 10%. So What do you have on yours plate!

Smaug

Here is a handy little build.

punkin

That is nice mate. He has used the copper pipe in the same way as i see the anodised aluminium pipe being used.

Smaug

Yes he wanted to marry his copper aesthetic into the SS as best he could. I think he did a great job. I like his little horn shaped vents he has installed for his surge breaker.

I believe he is also going to install a 2" butterfly valve above his boiler fill port and use his Torpedo top as a CIP fill port. He will load the column with his cleaning solution (spent beer , citric acid or some such) and allow it to soak for a period of time till his plates are nice and bright again. Then simply open the valve and dump the column and rinse.

A pretty handy solution for cleaning up,,,,,,so long as he is mindful to insure the valve is in the open position at the start of the next run!

punkin

Scary.

Maybe a big yellow or red tag hanging off it would be helpfull. Like a foot square one. ~:>

Smaug

Well it will naturally be in the open position from the prior drain.......But yes,,,extreme caution.

bentstick

Sweet rig there!

nvnovrts

what make are those thermometers?

CothermanDistilling

who is going be the first person to put one of these under vacuum?

Lloyd

=)) Not me. Hopefully not anyone else. Vacuum means tight joints and seals and this was not designed for that. A vac still is a test of how well you can seal off every possible connection. I doubt this still could achieve a vacuum with all the silicone gaskets that's needed.

But it would be just soooo cool to try!

fnulnu

Handy? That thing is friggin sweet. Especially like the allthread pipe covers. Adds some bling.

Lloyd

Sight glasses are cool.
Unobstructed 360 degree view of the action is waaaay cool.
It's more work to assemble/disassemble than a Dash but you don't look inside the still; you are part of the still. Until you experience it you cannot understand.

Its that good. I swear.

Stinger

@Smaug In the "handy little build" above, is the 5th (lowest) plate simply added using a dash gasket and plate? and How would this work on top of my Dash (assuming sufficient headroom with or without access through the ceiling ;) )?

Smaug

Hi Stinger, That lowest gasket is a flat gasket that comes with the requisite sight tower needed to complete this assembly.

Smaug

@nvnovrts said: what make are those thermometers?

They come from Grainger

captainshooch

@Lloyd What are your thughts on a 4 plate crystal on top of a 6 plate dash2 for a total of 10 plate with 11000 w electric and either 26 or 55 gal pot. Do you think i will be able to drive all 10 plate without having to use excessive amount of heat for a neutral product on 1 run straight from the ferm at 12% +/- wash?

Lloyd

That will definitely work, @captainshooch. I've run 4" x 10 plates before but I'm limited to about 6000 watts. I'm jealous of anyone that can put 10,000+ watts into a boiler. 26 gallon with 4" column sounds like a very nice combination but at 55 gallons you might consider a bigger column or the run could take longer than you want.
I'm not a big fan of trying to go directly from wash to neutral. In an ideal world, you'd have a big old stripping still - basically a big boiler and little more than the biggest product condenser you can put on it - and run it as hard and fast as you can. The strip from that still would feed a much smaller, plated or packed, still that can take that high proof (about 35 to 45% ABV) and give you a good long clean hearts cut.
Ain't nothing wrong with running both stills at the same time. Your stripper boiler should be about 2.5 to 3 times the size of the spirit boiler.
So a 250L (70 US gallons) stripping still charged with 12% wash should produce about 24 gallons of strip at 35%. A perfect boiler charge for a 26 gallon (100L) spirit still where you can add a couple of gallons of feints from the previous run, probably bumping up your charge closer to 40% ABV. This should produce about 6 gallons of azeotrope plus about 2 gallons of feints.
And since this is a hypothetical perfect world, that 6 gallons of azeo can be cut back to about 40% and fill a 50L keg boiler that is dedicated to running one of these. (Shameless promotion of the GB4)

captainshooch

Thanks @Lloyd You just pretty much described my set up. The 50 gallon stripper gives me enough out of a 40 gallon wash to make anywhere from 13 to 18 gals including tails from previous to load the 26 with the dash with 30-40 % decent 8-9 hour run, long enough for me. Just wanted to make sure I was not adding too many plates and running into pressure problems. Guess Smaug will be getting a call from me today.

Lloyd

Did a hybrid-hybrid experimental run today to see the new 4" dephlegmator through it's paces on the Crystal Dragon.
From the boiler up it was 3 copper bubble cap plates, a packed section of SS wool, a 4" filter disk to try to disperse the reflux on to the top of the wool (that did not work at all), then a perf plate and finally 2 more bubble cap plates.
I threw all of my 6000 watts at it and the super dephleg never breathed hard. That's going to be a winner.
The disbursement of reflux across the surface of the SS wool packed section definitely needs work.
I put more boiler power than EVER before and the results were surprising; greater than 7 liters per hour with a 4" column pulling azeotrope.
I don't know about product quality as this was just a test of equipment using junk alcohol.

The product condenser could barely keep up and the product was quite warm. The alcoholmeter was pegged at over 100% (always pretty to see) so next time I may add a pre-condenser to help the product condenser cope with the huge flow.

I filmed the run but plan to reconfigure the still to take advantage of what I learned today and post the video from tomorrow.

7 liters per hour at or very close to azeotrope at about 6 kW on a 4" column is, in my opinion, excessive and pushing the limit. My comfort level is about 3 L/H to insure quality but with the new super dephlem the bar might be raised a notch.

captainshooch

@Lloyd 3L/H is what I like as well, around 20 minutes per quart. Nice and slow. Oh BTW, made the call to Smaug yesterday, my crystal dragon is on it's way :D but I will not be able to mess with it until next week. :(

CothermanDistilling

@captainshooch - got mine yesterday! - for 4 plates, 5 sections of glass, the tubes need to be about 20.125" to compress the stack about 1/16". I had some thick wall stainless tubing lying around, ~.53 OD, ~.35ID, I cut it to length, then going to drill a cross-hole .5" from end and tack weld the threaded rod in. The plate of the sight tower is exactly two nuts thick, so put three nuts on the threaded rod with the desired amount of thread sticking out, slide into the tube, and tack weld. If it works, I will polish it up... If I had enough extra, I would offer to give you some of the pipe, but don't have quite enough...

edit - this looks like what I have, I got it from the alro metals 'drops' pile for $4/lb... not cheap to make four 20" sections from new, but if you can find 1/4" 304 stainless pipe @ Grainger at a scrapper, it fits nicely.

captainshooch

Thanks @CothermanDistilling you have saved me quite some effort trying to figure out the pipes. Definitely going with stainless :D