The VDL70-7 lab thin film evaporator features a 0.07 square meter evaporation area, suitable for both small-scale experiments and relatively substantial small batch production. It can process up to 3 kg per hour, and with continuous distillation, it can handle dozens of kilograms of material daily.
For laboratory setups, fewer customers typically opt for lab-type film evaporation equipment. This is mainly because lab-type short-path/molecular distillation units can generally cover most of the functionalities of film evaporation equipment. However, film evaporation equipment also has its specific application areas, such as:
The raw material contains a high proportion of light components that need to be removed, and using a film evaporator would be more efficient.
- No high vacuum level required; typically below 1 mbar for separation is sufficient.
- The need for process scaling requires the film evaporator to prevent the splashing of light components more than the short-path evaporator, making it suitable for scaling up the film evaporation process to pilot or industrial production.
The film evaporator features a full jacket design, ensuring all contact points with the material are heated after entering the evaporator. Moreover, the external condenser for light components can also be jacket-heated, allowing light components with high melting points to be heated as well.
The film evaporator can serve as a reboiler for a distillation column, offering excellent scalability. Modified, it can become a distillation unit with a film evaporator as the reboiler, designed for separating components with closely adjacent boiling points.
The VDL70-7 laboratory film evaporator is equipped with a feed gear pump for feeding, where the frequency of the feed pump corresponds to the feed rate, ensuring high repeatability of the feed amount.
The gear pump discharge can achieve real-time variation of distillation conditions and real-time sampling. The gear pump discharge capacity reaches about one kilogram per hour. As both light and heavy components are equipped with gear pumps, sampling can be conducted simultaneously at the gear pump outlet. After weighing, the feed quantity data and key data like the distillation ratio of light components can be obtained, which can guide the experimental process at any time. Since the feed is continuous, the discharge of light and heavy components is also continuous. Sampling and discharge under vacuum conditions are unrestricted, enabling continuous distillation regardless of whether the light components or the heavy components are the product.
Two types of scraper rotors are available for selection. The WRS roller-type rotor is suitable for processing materials with lower viscosity, while the SKR metal elastic scraper-type rotor can handle materials with higher viscosity due to the loading force exerted by the elastic metal strips on the scraper, which allows for excellent scraping and turbulent effects on the liquid film.
