Hmmm. The little tanks look very similar to flash evaporators. One enterprising tinkerer made a FE to dry biodiesel. Used vacuum.
The idea is you spray your fluid into the tank and the lower pressure causes the water to flash to vapour while the bio drops to the bottom. In this case it would be ethanol flashing off and water droppng out. Don't think this one employs actual vacuum either, simply an expansion chamber to relieve the pressure in the feed pipe built up by the boiler.
The bottom drain feeding back to the inlet pipe of the previous chamber seems odd. If you used a venturi where the drain meets the feed to create suction in the drain it would lower the pressure in the chamber and enhance the flash effect. But, you would be diluting the charge heading to the previous chamber it feeds. I dunno.
I have a feeling that to work effectively it might require that the feed pipes are at pressure and spraying through a fine nozzle. The restriction at that point would cause the local pressurisation. Something we normaly avoid becuase we like not being at the epicentre of an explosion.
I'm not sure anyone in the thread knows how it is supposed to work or how the flows would work or should work or if they will work. No one seems to have built one. I only read the beginning and the end.
There is some suggestion that if you taper the bottom of the chamber you might get a hydrocyclone effect that spins water out of the vapour. I think that would be a very long thin cone. Not what is pictured. I do have the hydrocyclone formulae in a book somewhere.
I really don't know if my impressions are even a correct interpretation of the design. It may just be a simple matter of spraying liquid through vapour for an unconventional form of thermal mass exchange.
There is no reason other than safety concerns you couldn't use flash evaporation to seperate water and ethanol. A kind of vacuum thumper. But wouldn't an actual thumper be easier and safer? The vacuum could get you a higher azeo but the intent of the design seems to be to avoid height. You could do that with a little ring of thumpers around the take off column; all sat on the boiler as usual.
Now the idea is in my head a final vacuum flash evaporator stage just to raise azeo might be a one day plan... No real need for it except because we can.
If you decide to build this. Build small. Be careful. Arrange for us to be notified if you die.
Well. You asked for a Vulcan.
Posted: Wed May 20, 2015 9:39 pm
