I am in the very beginning of trying to understand column still designs.
Why are some columns designed with the take off port above the defhleg and some below?
The reason I'm wondering is that refluxed heads could be circulated so that heads are collected first and hearts later in any case?
I've seen designs where hearts ( I guess ) is collected from the middle ? What do you recommend and what do I need to know?
Contaminator , I think you may have seen a pic of a still with a heads trap . It’s a method a few have tried . The idea is that heads do pass by the RC which is I guess working as a deflag and are concentrated at the top . I apologise if I have this wrong if someone knows it better .
I also believe that only a few have tried it and it wasn’t all that effective .
Now the other thing I suspect you may be getting confused with is continuous stills . These feed the wash into basically the middle of the plated stack , the water and tails goes down and the heads and hearts go up . Due to the different fractions separating at different points n the column , you can tap in where you want to draw hearts and the heads up the top.
Because we invarably use batch distilling where the wash goes into the boiler , the fractions all evetually leave via the top .
As there is a constant progression throughout the run , there is no one spot up the coloumn that you could say is the ideal place to draw off a particular fraction as it changes throughout the run .
