I just came back to this forum after a bit of an absence and thought I would show you my little creation. I wanted to build a centrifuge and I decided to use my miling machine as the base. That's already a cheat but hey, I have one so I figured I would use it.
First off, for the haters that will freak out that I'm housing room temperature, 40% alcohol in a plastic bottle, I hope to switch to stainless bottles but for now, I'll use P.E.T., just like the distilleries do.
Right now, the weak link is the amount of force I can put on the cap. I know I can successfully contain 100 psi in a P.E.T. bottle so I did the math to figure out what the force on the cap would be at that point. From that, I can calculate the equivalent RPM that will generate the same centrifugal force load on the cap. My numbers say that's about 150 rpm but so far I haven't had the guts to go that high. i'm at about 120 rpm and I'll see how that does. I designed it to accept 2, 3, 4 or 6 bottles in order to stay balanced. My milling machine won't clear a full 2 liter pop bottle so I am using 1 liter bottles. Since I plan to rack the clear stuff off first, 6 liters should be plenty to spin the dregs at the bottom.
This was my plan.
Today I finally got it put together and spun up. I didn't want to lose too much of the good stuff so I have water on once side and raspberry liqueur on the other. So far I haven't managed to repaint my shop walls in raspberry red. Here's what it looks like in operation.
https://youtu.be/JAS4JJ71E4w