DME gas through the regultor problem.

[Y123Y]

I am currently setting up a combustion experiment and I encountered a problem with a fuel I am using.

For this set up, I am using DME gas and thread type is POL.

When DME is released through the regulator, it gets really cold that it almost freezes over in few minutes. (This is beacuse of latent heat of vaporization within the bottle, and for regulator - isentropic expenstion of the gas, cools and joule thomson cooling effect)

Thus, this needs to be fixed.

For this issue, the one proposed method is putting heaters near the regultor so it does not freeze

Other method is placing a flexible line between DME bottle and regulator. Flexible line from the bottle to the regulator (In line heaters)

Heat up these line with the heater is or put the flexible line in the hot bucket of water is suggested.

Since the bottle connection doe not involove the electricity, this option is came out to be most relevent method.

However, I wonder would there be better way to deal with such a problem.

 

[moltenmetal]

You should be evaporating DME in the BOTTLE, not in the REGULATOR! The regulator will still get cold, but the amount of cooling should be minimal if it is not being asked to evaporate liquid. Are you sure you're connected to the headspace of the storage bottle rather than to a dip tube intended to deliver LIQUID? The bottle, having a much larger surface area than the regulator, can fall to a fairly low temperature and ice up a bit on the outside, and the vapour pressure of the liquid in the bottle will drop as it cools, but simply immersing the bottle in a pail of hot water will usually be sufficient- unless your evaporation rate is very high indeed. You can have a trickle of hot water continuously fed to the pail and overflowing into a drain.

If you must evaporate liquid outside the bottle, you'll need sufficient heat transfer area to do so. They do make heated regulators for this purpose.