inline stripping flange

[cayars]

Look up on the web, Armagnac Still.
and find a diagram.

Nice, never heard of this still type before.

[pope]

Gotta love that the first google image result for "armagnac still" shows the spirit running out of the continuous still and straight into a barrel

[Evil Wizard]

I'm back and finished my 6" wide copper shotgun for the heat recovery portion of my fully functioning continous stripper. Had face surgery for sleep apnea, which slowed me down, got a job running a 5000L Kothe (potato vodka), went to costa rica and taught coffee farmers how to build VM stills and make lovely hooch from their agricultural byproducts, now running a vintage armagnac still (continuous) as my day job l. Hopeful that my boss will get me plugs for 80 amps of 220v so I can hook up the 6" continuous still I built and we will see how fast it goes. I'd like to break 30Lph of distillate.

It took me four days to figure out the armagnac still design (runs on propane), now I'm doing a cranberry wine vinegar sac run, then I'll have to ferment something to try and figure out how to run it properly. I'm glad I spent three years building continous stills otherwise I would have had a rough go at this. I may have trouble later and hope y'all can help out.

[RC Al]

Dose anyone know why the partition in the condenser part of the armagnac still? 99% of the pics have it.

Only reason I can think is a form of baffle?

Still waiting on a diagram of your set up E W

[Evil Wizard]

Hey RC, shoot me a pic of what you're looking at. A partition might be indicating the difference between being cooled by wash or by water.

You want a diagram? I still have blisters on my fingers from the soldering! Its working really good with the PID controlling the flow rate. Waiting on a few custom parts from China.

[LWTCS]

The diagrams do show either side of the two chambers connected by plumbing.
I would reckon the partition is needed because using the feed stock solely as the cooling medium does not have enough knockdown power to adequately cool the distillate?
Perhaps the partition acts as a way to create a kind of thermal break or insulator? A way to hack the gradient above maybe?

Modern continuous systems usually need a dedicated cooling circuit for the final product condenser. With out a dedicated condenser the run speeds would be bottle necked by the lack of cooling.

[LWTCS]

Tell ya what, building a distillery onto the incline/decline of a hill is a perfect way to exploit free energy. The design may be slow by modern standards but it is genius really.

[Evil Wizard]

Yes taking advantage of height is a a great power saver. Ferment on the bottom floor. The power of the boil raises the low wines to the second floor. Drain them into the finish still by gravity, boil them up into the finish tanks/barrels. Drain them back down into the blending tanks. No pumps.

Regarding the continuous still, yes you must have a secondary water cooler. I call it a mercy cooler. Wash has less thermal capacity than water and vapor rate can be inconsistent. If you have a mercy cooler then you need not throttle your feed rate based on the wash's cooling capacity.

Better to throttle the rate based on how much alcohol you are losing out the bottom, or like Larry does, based on the vapour temp at the column top.

[LWTCS]

Yes taking advantage of height is a a great power saver. Ferment on the bottom floor. The power of the boil raises the low wines to the second floor. Drain them into the finish still by gravity, boil them up into the finish tanks/barrels. Drain them back down into the blending tanks. No pumps.

Sorry for the drift, but I'm also talking about pressing the juice too and moving that with gravity too. Just like so many of those cool cachaca distilleries in Brazil. Each subsequent operation is further down hill. That's what I want haha.

[RC Al]

Thanks guys, so its seperating the final cooling from the heat exchanger, the bottom tank would stay relatively cool and the top volume is reduced, making it more responsive to the input adjustments that you would need if you were running it on variable power like wood or coal, pretty clever those old timers eh