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07 December 2001
Readers Respond
The E-Bulletin Archive
Sheldon;
That we now have an archive that Google can abstract is almost as good a bit of news as the amount of money that came to the organization over the past couple of months. About a year ago I suggested to Shawn that the inability of search engines to handle SAS Forum dynamic pages was a hindrance. Not only is it great for the general public to get their hands on our good stuff, but it is excellent advertising for the organization. I'll bet it leads to more memberships, publicity, and perhaps donations.
Good work guys.
Kevin Kilty
More on Distillation
Sheldon:
It's rather difficult to get a leakproof seal on the jacket of a home made condenser. Old style Liebig condensers used rubber tubing that fit the inner tube snugly and stretched to fit over the jacket ends. Modern ones use screw fitting seals. For the lamp chimney condenser you don't need a seal at the top; just use a 3-hole rubber stopper at the bottom and use the third hole to accommodate an overflow tube. It's much easier to keep one end sealed than to seal both.
I once made a Kipp generator that was simpler than the one described by Sidney Gernsback. I'll send in a drawing and description of it as soon as I get my scanner working properly.
Norm
Shawn,
After thinking about it for a while another idea occured to me. Unwanted window air conditioners are quite easy to acquire. Each has two heat exchangers. Liberate the heat exchangers, ones with copper coils are the best. There is no lead used in these units. Cool the exchanger with a small muffin fan and distill away.
Jim Hannon
Another possibility for a distiller is to use a radiator designed for a car or other vehicle. (The idea is to use mass produced items to cut down on cost for a given capability.) The only caution I can think of is that if the radiator has been used, the residual antifreeze is usually toxic. Most of the radiators are now apparently aluminum and they contain turbulators which would be useful. See http://www.howstuffworks.com/cooling-system5.htm Heat exchange calculation information can be found at http://www.unb.ca/che/Undergrad/proposed/radiator.pdf
There are other possibilities such as water cooling the fins. I hesitate posting this because I have not actually tried using a radiator for this purpose. I'm not sure of how the liquid might be drained etc... there are lots of different radiator designs. Can you think of any other potential problems?
Best Wishes,
Peter Baum
Peter,
Moonshiners used car radiators for their stills. The big problem in the past was that the radiators were brass and copper soldered with lead based solder. This was the main reason people got sick or died drinking moonshine, the lead in the booze. You can get rid of a lot of heat with a radiator and it would take a rather large still to need that much capacity. The heat exchanger I presented was about 3 feet long and when water cooled would work quite well for any still heated by a bunsen burner or other small heat source. I have another homemade heat exchanger in my house now, made the same way with two 10 foot runs of pipe. It transfers the heat from my hot water house heat to the DHW (domestic hot water) storage tank. From the way it behaves it looks like is is capable of transferring about 80000 btu per hour.
Jim Hannon
Hi Jim,
Nice thinking Jim. I believe the air conditions have fans in them that could be used as well. You might want to collect these ideas and post them either in the Forum or as something for the E-bulletin.
I was thinking a little more about nest egg temperatures. The setup (experiment) suggested in the forum needs to take into consideration the time interval over which that the temperature drops. The assumption (if I understand this correctly) is that since the quantity of heat transferred varies directly with time and temperature delta, one can use this time and temperature delta to compare the proposed heater protocol with the real hen/nest (which is experimentally determined). It is complex though, because once you have transferred a certain quantity of heat, there is the issue of how much, over what time interval, and how the chick might respond to this cooling. One can ignore some of these conditions if the time interval in the proposed setup is less than that of the hen/nest setup (also assuming the quantity of heat is less as well.)
There are probably other interesting factors - you mentioned one about turning the eggs. Also the nest is straw or whatever and there may be more than one egg (increased thermal mass). There must be experiments in the literature about all this.... I wonder how well they were done and if some of this is just folklore or compromises due to certain automation constraints.
This egged me on (so to speak) to do a little search. Wow! There sure are a lot of things to consider: http://www.msstate.edu/dept/poultry/trouble.htm
Here is some interesting temperature information http://msucares.com/poultry/reproductions/poultry_temp.html
Information about lower temperatures, hen's body temperature, etc. http://www.uga.edu/~poultry/tips/tips97jan3.htm
Another temperature range. (I hadn't realized humidity was that important.) Information about other kinds of eggs.
http://www.ianr.unl.edu/pubs/poultry/g524.htm
"upper lethal limit is very close to the optimum incubating temperature" and other neat information: http://muextension.missouri.edu/xplor/agguides/poultry/g08353.htm
Well, I need to stop. It sounds as though the temperature range you saw was for optimum in the sense of rapid growth. This may be a factor for large production houses trying to maximize profit but for someone doing experiments or with other goals (like a cheaper incubator thermostat) lower temperatures may be better.
Regards,
Peter Baum
