Calculators

[Uncle Jesse]

A while back Husker emailed me a new php file for the calculators. He said it should fix them.

https://homedistiller.org/wiki/index.php/calcs.php

I put it there. Could folks please check and see how things are working? If it works, we should link it from the wiki home page, agreed?

[NZChris]

The dilution calculator has always been flawed. E.g. at 80%, 1l has 800ml of alcohol. To dilute that to 40% you need to finish with the 800ml in 2l. While the calculation might seem logical, in practice, by adding 1l, you would get close to 1.960l at a bit over 40.8%.

I'm sure it's a lot easier to design a calculator that can tell you the final volume to aim for than it is to come up with an algorithm for water to add. I can do both calculations without help from an online calculator, but I don't think I'm capable of writing an algorithm for water to add.

[GCB3]

Hey Jesse,
The ethanol temperature conversion calculator is still kicking you back to the parent site homepage when you hit calculate.
Thanks for working on this.

[Bushman]

Hey Jesse,
The ethanol temperature conversion calculator is still kicking you back to the parent site homepage when you hit calculate.
Thanks for working on this.

Good catch, with very little programming experience I thought I could look at the code but I do not have access (probably a good safety net). Also if you click on the HD table link within that formula it sends you to a Not Found page.

[NineInchNails]

Yeah it's still doing that today. I just checked.

Question ... is there a vapor temp to ABV calculator on the Parent Site? I looked a couple times and couldn't find one.

Also is there a boiler temp to ABV calculator or would that be the same as vapor?

[Mr Sippy]

VLE_Calc.zip

(11.78 KiB) Downloaded 190 times

Here is a boiler temp to ABV calculator for a pot still that I wrote but have not yet tested. The equations involved for these type of thermodynamic problems are based on experimentation/observation under lab conditions. So without additional end-user coefficients/parameters, they all are only approximations, albeit close ones. I compared results from my own calculator to Perry and from other sources (see the screenshots). At lower concentrations of ethanol, my calculations differ from Perry by 0.2 - 0.4 degrees C.

This calculator uses an atmospheric pressure correction so you're not constrained to 'sea level' results. Enter known pressure in mmHg or have pressure calculated from elevation (meters) and air temperature (degrees C). The data must be entered in integers- NO decimal points. There's not much in error handling, so if the program hangs up, just close and start again. The program then generates a VLE_Calc.dat text file containing all the data fields. Copy to Excel to plot boil curve or use as a lookup table.

The application is in C and uses standard thermodynamic algorithm: Antoines Eq. to find temperature and saturated vapor pressures, and modified Raoults Law to find vapor concentration. Raoults is modified with van Laar activity coefficients to model for non-ideal behavoir. Molar to ABV conversion uses Edwin Croissant's data.

As a note: Perry's data is heavy at the lower concentrations of ethanol where the slope seems to change the most. The data also seems to index on key inflection points. I have a suspicion that a linear interpolation between Perry's data points would yield a reasonably approximate result also.

For those who like to keep an eye on data I hope you find this calculator useful.

[zapata]

This german distiller site that was linked a few days ago has awesome calculators. (Including the simple vapor temp / ABV requested above, and a dilution calculator that factors shrinkage) Somebody official wanna put on a clean shirt, knock on the door and ask if we can copy (and translate) them?

https://hobbybrennen.ch/Rechner/

Destillationssimulator2 in particular is simple and polished (though I'd love to see a thumper version of it). Destillationssimulator1 makes a nice graph with cuts based on various parameters. Begleitstoffesimulator is just a stupid good simulator with relative volatilities of 50 or so congeners. Really though, if we can't copy and translate or at least emulate, I'm just going to use theirs for everything going forward, it's a very useful site even with the language barrier.

[Corsaire]

Just send Hügelwilli a pm? He's on here every now and then.

[haggy]

This german distiller site that was linked a few days ago has awesome calculators. (Including the simple vapor temp / ABV requested above, and a dilution calculator that factors shrinkage) Somebody official wanna put on a clean shirt, knock on the door and ask if we can copy (and translate) them?

https://hobbybrennen.ch/Rechner/

Destillationssimulator2 in particular is simple and polished (though I'd love to see a thumper version of it). Destillationssimulator1 makes a nice graph with cuts based on various parameters. Begleitstoffesimulator is just a stupid good simulator with relative volatilities of 50 or so congeners. Really though, if we can't copy and translate or at least emulate, I'm just going to use theirs for everything going forward, it's a very useful site even with the language barrier.

Please check out my pot/thumper calculator model in the Research and Theory Forum " Hail the Mighty Thumper " topic. I have been developing this model the past 3/4 months. My pot simulation part agrees exactly with hobbybrennen calculator. I developed the thumper model from basic chemistry principles.

Kareltje supplied many of his run data sets and my model agreed with his thumper data. I also searched many HD posts and found thumper data from Usge, Beerswimmer , Chauncey, Yonder and some others. I have run the model on all these run sets and it compares well to reality.

If you supply me with a set of input data for run conditions you would like to see, I would be glad to model them and feedback the results.

If my Excel spreadsheet model can be translated to run in the HD Calculator section, I would donate it to HD forum. I need to know if the forum is interested and would support this. Thanks

[NormandieStill]

Would it be possible to extend the pot still calculator to return more than 10 rows? I quite like faffing with during a run to see if I can get the results to line up with my real world data but it's hard to get the granularity I need.

In a previous life I was a professional programmer so I don't mind doing it myself if that's an option.

[Hügelwilli]

In a previous life I was a professional programmer so I don't mind doing it myself if that's an option.

So you probably see, that it is a javascript-calculator, what means, that you can download the code, change whatever you want, save it in a html-file and run it offline on your computer.
One way to get the code: Press CTRL + U. It works in most browsers.

[NormandieStill]

Ah. I had looked previously and thought I saw server side code. I'll grab a copy and make myself an offline version.