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Methanol Recovery headache
How much methanol should I expect to recover when making 50 gallons of bio and using 20% methanol. I think it should maybe be around 2 or 3 gallons but that seems excessive... We finally got our reactor online today and did the reaction phase at 120F then turned it up to 150F and opened up our condensor. At first we got a few drops, maybe a few milliliters, but then it stopped. My friend was like.. maybe that's all we're going to get... But i didn't buy it. Anyways, we opened valves to the atmosphere on the top and nothing would come out. So after a few mins for whatever reason we turned our vacuum pump on the water heater and methanol just started pouring out of it. Basically what it seems like is that the methanol is all in vapor in the water heater but it doesn't want to come out. There is no driving pressure. So wth... how to get it out? Maybe it was condensing in my condensor before it was being able to get out, therefore just dripping back into the tank?
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