looking for a pilot scale reboiler

[GrandH]

Hi all,
I am looking for a pilot scale reboiler for an elevated-pressure distillation system. The basic requirements for the reboiler are

Material Steel
Volume 1 L
Power: electric heat 2kW
Temperature up to 300 oC
Pressure: up to 300 psi

I have been looking around for a while, but only found big ones(industry scales). Does anybody know if there is any equiptment company in U.S. might have solutions for such a pilot scale reboiler? You suggestions will be highly appreciated! Thank you!

Grand

 

[StoneCold]

GrandH
Pope Scientific might be willing to build you a custom unit. They make pilot plant equipment.
I am not sure exactly the purpose of the pilot operation but maybe you could just use a stab in heater in the bottom of the column in your pilot plant?
Are you looking to make the full scale reboiler a thermal siphon reboiler? Is that your concern?
Electric heating will give you different characteristics than steam heating will when you scale it up. Surface temperature of the elements are much hotter than steam.

Regards
StoneCold

 

[GrandH]

StoneCold,
Thanks for your reply.
We need such a reboiler only for a research project. Since the steam source here doesn't meet the requirement, we have to use a electric heater.
Thanks again.

Regards,
Grand

 

[moltenmetal]

You're not going to find this on the shelf. You'll need to have it made for you. It's dead simple to make a basic kettle reboiler: a flanged electric immersion heater from someone like Chromalox, Gaumer, CCI Thermal etc. mounted inside a piece of pipe with mating flanges at each end- one to match your column, one to match the heater's flange, with concentric reducers if necessary. You'll also need a continuous level transmitter interlocked to shut off the element- if you use differential pressure for the level measurement, you'll need two ports on the shell for that purpose, plus a drain/liquid pump-out port. These can be done with o-let or threaded half-coupling connections welded to the wall of the pipe.

2 kW with a dead volume of 1L sounds impractical- I think you'll be building a unit with more than 1L hold-up.

If you need a complete pilot column, talk to Zeton (

http://www.zeton.com)

- they specialize in the design and construction of pilot- and demonstration-scale modular plants and are experts in small scale process equipment.

 

[rainyathena]

You may already realize this...but just in case...

consider what you may want in this reactor, ex - temperature indicator, level controller, pressure indicator, port for column connection, stirrer, etc.

Thus the volume of 1 Liter that you are scaling for may be larger due to the constraints of these equipments.

I have looked for reactors this size myself and they are considered to be more lab-scale rather than pilot scale so you may want to conduct a search for vendors in laboratory scales.

I realize that this was not an answer to your question, but hope it helps anyways...