Will this design work?

[Jorr_it]

Hello everyone,

So I'm thinking about turning my lm nixon into a lm/vm still. My question is does the design in the awesome paint drawing I made work? Will it give me a better separation between the heart and faints? If I understand correctly you can fine tune the RR way better with a vm than with a lm, so might this or will it work? My Idea is to first take off the foreshots with the lm setup, with a fully opened gate valve and a slightly opened needle valve. And thus switch to a vm setup with a fully opened needle valve and some what of a halve opened gate valve.

Note; All my piping has a diameter 5,5 cm or 2,16''. And my culumn is filled with SPP.

Greetings,

Jorrit

[EventfulAnimal]

What you have depicted here still seems like a LM setup. To make it a VM still you need to split the vapour stream in two at some point. From what I can tell, all your gate valve does in this diagram is constrict the flow rate of vapour to your condenser. It's also a potential bomb, if you were to accidentally shut the gate valve off completely at some point.


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[bluefish_dist]

Make the top a T with the gate valve on one side and the lm on the other side. I run two stills like that right now. Works well.
What you have drawn is an accident waiting to happen. The column has to be open at all times to not blow up due to pressure buildup.

[Yummyrum]

No it won't work as shown and yes it will blow up if you closed that big gate valve .

If you only intend to use the VM for taking off high ABV spirit then the still will normally be working with about a 9:1 reflux ratio . That means to vapour is split so 1/10 of it exits the VM take off while the other 9/10's of it splits to the reflux coil .

So the reality of this is that the area of the takeoff port when fully open only needs to be about a 1/10 the area of the column diameter . Doing the math , a 3/4" gate valve would be perfect size VM take off port for a column of your diameter .Any larger and you will be either taking off poor quality spirit or having to run it almost closed which as I know is a pain in the arse when it comes to adjusting it .


Where you put it is your choice but it needs to come out the side of the column or even the capped off tee would work .

But never put it where you showed it

[EventfulAnimal]

This is one way you could make it work - add a second condenser in line with the column and a weir to capture the distillate before the takeoff valve.

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[bluefish_dist]

Build this if you want vm/lm. I really like vm as it runs well and is easy to tell when the run is done.