It sounds to me that you have a good setup and process. I think it would be better to raise the temperaature to about 165 or so to drive off the methanol. I wouldn't even worry about driving off the water as most of it is in the soap & byproduct.

Are you planning to filter through a resin column or wood shavings? I think that most people who have used wood shavings will not go back to water washing.

quote:

Are you planning to filter through a resin column or wood shavings? I think that most people who have used wood shavings will not go back to water washing.

I plan to do both. 1st column wood shavings, 2nd column Thermax. I am anxious to get this to work because basically I have no easily accessible water supply and drain.

Sadly, I am struggling with the purity of the recovered methanol. I have used the vacuum system and without using a PID to control the temperature, I was able to drive off all the methanol in an earlier batch, but turns out I got around 86%-94% pure methanol. Which when I re-used, simply created more soap. I know I had a good amount of water as some my expensive Tygon Biodiesel tubing inner lining cracked. (This tubing does this when exposed to water.) So hopefully this new method will make the the recovered methanol more pure. If not, I will have to do some more reading on refracting columns and work perfecting one of those.

As I have a Sandy Brae and the soap test kit (well the blue indicator and the method now down) I hope to come up with good data points on how much water is at every stage and how soap is affected.

If anybody has a glycerin test kit from Utah-Bio or has easy access to GC machine, I would love to have corresponding samples tested for glycerin.

One last point/question. It is interesting to me that here we all are talking about vacuum, air pressure and temps and trying to differentiate between them for separating methanol and water. Yet when you have wet biodiesel after water washing it and then you simply spray it against the side of barrel at ambient temps (70F or so) and blow air from a small fan on it, it will dry relatively quickly and down to a low ppm count - under 1000 and close to 600. We are all missing something here and I am just not sure what it is. Kinetic energy the pump is adding when the wet bio hits the wall perhaps? If so, how do then separate the water and meth? Perhaps not with recirculating but with a simple boiling still in the end.

Thanks
Doug

If you are not adding water to the process, I don't see why you would need to dry the BD. I live in a very humid climate and water has never been a problem with my brew.

If you aren't heating the BD up too high during the methanol recovery, your recovered methanol should be at least 94 - 96%. Something doesn't sound right. Maybe someone else could chime in with their experiences.