Design and construction of an automated multipurpose distiller
Abstract
Steam distillation is the widely used method for the extraction of essential oil for many years. These essential oils are used in foods, medicines, cosmetics, perfumes etc. It can be a money earning business for the community. Industrial distillation products such as essential oils, ethanol and methanol are very crucial raw materials for the pharmaceutical industry and utilities for hospitals. The current industrial distillation technologies are specialized to a single distillation product and moreover very expensive to startup and entail high maintenance costs yet the counterpart small scale distillation technologies are very energy-inefficient and manual and thus have the lowest distillate product yield rates. Herein is discoursed a robust integrated versatile medium-duty distillation solution technology that is automated to satisfactorily meet the consumers’ needs ranging from optimized high distillate concentration yields, to optimized high energy-efficiency to flexibility with the nature of distillation process raw material. Since the water essential oil distillation is notorious for its inflexibility with herbage raw material as well as its very low energy efficiency while the industrial dry steam also demands very high running-energy and start-up costs with, the water-steam essential oil distiller was considered with a modified closed heater-temperature control loop so as to do away with its only drawback of deterioration of raw material and thus decreased product yield as compared to the dry steam essential oil distiller. Such a distillation technology would have to be multipurpose so as to enable the local distillation businesses to operate smoothly through both seasonal markets of ethanol and essential oils.