My StillDragon Activated Carbon Filter

jacksonbrown

Rain water usually has heaps of stuff in it. Try boiling it to de-gas it and it wont taste anywhere near as sweet.
Maybe it has something to do with spec but the plants that we worked on were producing water for some pretty serious chem processes, not just drinking water.
There was also polishing with ion exchange resin beds and other weird stuff too.
Pure H2O don't taste good, fact, and it isn't very good for you either. The explanation I got was it has a scavenging property to take ions back up that dissolves lots of materials.

Another explanation I just read suggested dissolved O2 and CO2 might have something to do with it:

Reverse Osmosis Water. Why so aggressive and what to do about it? @ Engineering Forums

I don't know, but if there was no point we wouldn't have spent $100,000's designing and building to the customers spec.

Kapea

I just took orders for three $100k+ brackish well water RO systems this week. But what do I know?

Two of them will be powered by 100% PV, but that part comes under a separate contract.

Kapea

FWIW I live on the windward side of Gilligans Island in the rainforest. I've been using rainwater catchment for my household water for over 12 years now.

jacksonbrown

Like I said, it probably comes down to the spec of the finished product.
I'm sure you know a lot more than I do but that doesn't mean I don't know shit.
I wasn't making it up

Kapea

Pure water leaching calcium out of your bones is an urban legend, right up there with EMF off of power transmission lines causing leukemia,

TheMechWarrior

Rainwater in the Sydney CBD is very different to the rainwater we receive down here at Cape Grim. So it makes perfect sense that nobody agrees on the quality of rainwater.

grim

DI only tastes like crap because it dissolves any food left in your mouth, which you then taste again.

If you ate apple pie, it tastes like apple pie.

If you eat ... I won't go there.

jacksonbrown

The Purest of Them All @ Scientific American Blog Network

Fiji_Spirits

Has this seen any new activity of late?

I'd be interested in pics of some Pro setups for carbon filtration. I like the idea of a pot fed/bottom up system that could reduce the need for a pump to run the filter. could be fed with a holding tank that I can fill with my regular movement pump. set it filter for the night then have it ready in the morning!

grim

I've been doing lots of work with powdered carbons.

It's easy. Weigh out the dose, dump it in the tank, start the timer. Once you've reached your reaction time, pump it through a series of filters to remove the carbon particulate. I can process 10-20 gallons in a half hour.

Waiting for some new samples from Cabot/Norit, specifically C Gran - which should be a while lot easier to work with than powder, which requires sub-micron filtration.

Fiji_Spirits

are you agitating the tank during the reaction?

grim

Minimal - the carbon remains in suspension.

grim

Gravity feed and just dripping through a U style tube is probably sufficient with granulated.

Kapea

Could you obtain simular results using eaiser to filter carbon particals of a larger size? Constant agitation might be a fair tradeoff for being able to use a looser filter.

And you might be able to regenerate your carbon.

grim

My use case is color removal from aged spirits.

Finally getting good at it, that we can pull color without significant flavor impacts.

As I understand it, it's about catching as many macro-sized color molecules as possible, and separating the liquid from the carbon before a significant of smaller flavor molecules are getting caught up.

I can attest to less volume and longer time yielding a pale yellow spirit with major flavor impacts. I would almost want to use a greater carbon volume with even less reaction time, but as it is the filter housings get packed with sludge. You'd almost need a centrifuge.

The guy from Norit is coming by tomorrow, so we will see if their c-gran stacks up to my virgin hardwood powdered.

What I've learned is contact time and carbon volume are both incredibly important. The powdered carbon works incredibly fast in comparison.

Fiji_Spirits

I have been toying with the idea of a centrifuge. the biodiesel folks have some models that would suit for our purposes. could probably separate yeast out too.

The Turnkey Simple Centrifuge

Raw Power BEAST Centrifuge 3500 RPM

jacksonbrown

looks very simple. the ones I've seen use stacked cones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19U5-uwjkK8

Fiji_Spirits

ive never seen the stacke cone design til now. very cool concept. looks expensive tho. hell, at $6k the raw power is expensive too i guess. the self cleaning thing would be critical for production environment.

Fiji_Spirits

you know... between centrifuges, vacuum stills, home built steam generators, ultra-sonics, molecular sieves, small scale continuous stills and the various other concepts put into action around this place, It's getting kinda like a big global distributed viral science experiment!

Is there any way to incorporate Lasers, superconductors or carbon nanotubes into distilling? I think I still have some spare cash left to play with... :|

punkin

@Fiji_Spirits said: I think I still have some spare cash left to play with... :|

Give me an email Steve, i have a solution to such problems as this. :))

jacksonbrown

They are an extremely cool concept. Someone explained the fluid mechanics behind them to me once.
The way fluid flows though them and the way the speed drops at the surface of the cones. There's a lot more going on that whats immediately obvious.
They're pretty much industry standard for clarifiers. They even have Bactofuges that pull out bacteria.
When SPX bought Seital I got shown a video of one clarifying red wine. The sludge outlet was just pumping out pink tooth paste from all the yeast it was pulling out.
They'd be great for treating stillage.

FloridaCracker

@Fiji_Spirits said: you know... between centrifuges, vacuum stills, home built steam generators, ultra-sonics, molecular sieves, small scale continuous stills and the various other concepts put into action around this place, It's getting kinda like a big global distributed viral science experiment!

Funny that you say this because on the last episode of Moonshiners, Tim was looking to be the first distiller to rapid age whiskey........

X_X

Fiji_Spirits

I swear I saw something about nanotubes and filtration somewhere.

grim

Holy cow, the good stuff is expensive, more than $500 a 50lb sack.

RobertS

@Fiji_Spirits, it gets better:

Filtering Water with Acoustics Nanotube Technology @ NASA

grim

Good thing it's really difficult to distill in zero gravity.

Fiji_Spirits

I wonder what it would do for ethanol? Are fusel oils bigger molecules than water? What about heads?

Fiji_Spirits

Oh. Did everyone catch the fact that the NASA filter uses ultrasonically driven molecular seives embedded with carbon nanotubes?

Kind of got the whole thing all in one there. Lol

grim

Really expensive carbon does not work well for color removal - bummer.

Kapea

Just put this on your label:

Best served in an opaque glass.