Another continuous stripping still

[Maritimer]

With 80 liters of Birdwatcher's wash to strip, I began to think of a continuous stripping still. This is a popular topic, but I wasn't able to find one like this.

Originally, I thought of a series of four teakettles, each one feeding its overflow into the next:

Schematic of continuous stripping still.jpg

As the wash is fed into the first, some of the ethanol boils off and as more comes in, the overflow goes to the next kettle. The overflow will be depleted compared to the wash coming in. Then it boils off some ethanol, gets depleted some more, and its overflow goes to the next kettle. The waste coming out will have little ethanol left in it.

Then, to make it simpler, I put the four kettles into a stock pot and took off the vapour from one outlet.

Then I got rid of the kettles and came up with this:

continuous pot still.jpg

The wash comes in via the lower gold pipe and exits via the upper green pipe. The cylindrical red things in each quadrant are 1000 watt teakettle heating elements. I can use my digitally-controlled-power power supply to tweak the power dissipated in each element.

The only difficulty in building this would be attaching the quadrant.

Would it be OK to use food grade silicone? It could easily withstand the temperature.