Distilling Challenges in Ecuador
At our Ecuador distillery, we distill many South American oils in these three chambers, each with a 14,000-liter capacity.
This is our distillery in Ecuador. I built three chambers, 14,000 liters each.
The separators are where you get to watch the lovely oil separate from the gas stage into liquid. What a beautiful sight!
The next problem I tackled was building heat exchangers. I had to build these because in Ecuador you can’t get cold water. You have to have cold water for good separation in the condenser because it has to go through a phase change. You can’t have 80 degree water in a condenser where you’re trying to create the phase change between gas and liquid.
So I had to build these heat exchangers to get my water from 82 degrees down to 50 degrees. I built them out of deep freezers, put copper coils in them, filled them with antifreeze so that they wouldn’t freeze, and now maintain their temperature on discharge at 45 degrees for our condensing process.
Next are the separators I built. These condensers are 13 feet long, and one heat exchanger is needed for each condenser.
