Ideas/wishes needed for electrical engineering thesis

[kingo102]

Hey,

I'm a final year electrical engineering student from the University of Queendsland in Australia. For our studies we need to complete a year long practical project either on a given topic, or one that we come up with. Naturally being addicted to this hobby I thought/hoped I could marry the two and work on something that relates to both and that may even give back to this community.

I run an electric element in my nixon-stone and do appreciate the benefit of an efficient voltage controller and may look at doing something in line with this. But are there any other ideas/wishes that would improve our process? So am throwing this one out there for the people... ideas on possible projects in the electrical/electronic side of distillation?


Apprecaite your help,
Dave

[Grayson_Stewart]

A thesis on the construction of a variac controler, the $ amount required for construction, the energy savingsand % output accomplished based on using a controller for different heat inputs, extrapolate to large scale energy production, and if you really want to go egghead....develop a P&ID that will work a still from a laptop.

[pintoshine]

Don't laugh. This would be a practical thing to do.
Create a digital alcohol refractometer.

The refractometer is not hard. The digital part would be equally easy.
Making it practical now that is a trick.

When I worked for Osram Sylvania, we meeasured the color distribution using a set of lenses pointed at a light source, which had a difuser at the output side. The light from the difuser would pass through a color corrected prism. The distributed colored light fell on a 1024 element sensor, in a line, and each element represented the intensity at that color. I imagined that a refractometer and a ccd array could do the same thing and the computer electronics could make it automatically temperature adjusted. The distribution through the refactometer at high alcohol levels is not a straight line but can be modeled using a taylor series to fit the curve.

Here is another Idea. There has recently been a lot of work on predictive PID controllers. Creating a very nicely tempertaure controlled mashing tun would be really cool, on a small scale. I have played with this with cheap, off the shelf, PID controllers and they lack the predictability to keep the temperture from oscillating and becoming unstable and finally turning into a bang-bang controller. By the way I am an electrical engineer also. Even though I write software for a living, I have done industrial controls for some time also. I especially like feedback control systems such as servos and PID control systems.

[masonjar]

Do you have to write something up or do you need to implement it as well? What specific field of electrical engineering sparks your interest the most?

And aren't you a little bit concerned about legality? You might want to consider taking the ethanol-fuel route so you can be considered a globally/environmentally aware student instead of a booze-hound. That way you'll get a lot more respect from the people out there that just don't understand how great this hobby is and how legal it should be.

All the projects I'm thinking of seem a bit trivial for a year-long study. Since the distilling process has rather little to do with electronics and more to do with physics and chemistry, you're kind of limited to electronic gadgets for distilling tools. Temperature/voltage regulators seem too easy for a year-long project and to me they've been pretty thoroughly covered - unless you want to get into advanced controllers per Pinto's suggestion. But I'll warn you that you might be biting off too much if you go that route. I'm currently working on my EE master's degree specializing in control theory and it's no walk in the park!

I like the refractometer idea and the microwave idea (although that seems prohibitively dangerous for a school project), or maybe you could pretend you're going for ethanol fuel and try to electronically automate the process from the mash to the 95% ethanol product - sort of like a bread machine. You could also take a shot at efficient ethanol fuel by reusing the distilling heat energy for mashing and using the outgassing of the ferment to do work - but that's not exactly an electronics project.

Do you have any other interests besides distilling? There are quite a few things out there that would be more valuable when it comes time to find a job than distilling-related electronics. Just my opinion...

[possum]

How about a sensor that uses the varying dielectric property of ethanol/HOH to measure it's proof?
Resistivity?
Of course these things would also vary based on any ion content present .
Thats the most electrical avenue I could think up.

[kingo102]

Hey guys,

Thanks for all your ideas and comments. After a bit of a look around, I am considering both the idea of the electronic eth concentration tool, and also a PID controlled heating system. I have done a bit of work before on switchmode PSUs/converters (not so much on control).

Of course this would all be in the interests of the fuel ethanol industry. Masonjar you did also mention that there would be a few things I should also be considering that would be more valuable? I'm definitely open to all ideas here so let me know if there's something that is of interest to either yourself, or the EE community in general. I do have to write up my research in a thesis for my undergad degree, and my interests generally lie in power electronics.

[madscientist]

Of course these things would also vary based on any ion content present .

But if you put the sensor in the column you should not have ions since the water content will essentially be distilled and the organics will not hold a formal charge only a dipole moment.

Not sure that conductivity would be the best way to measure exact output on the fly.