WVO Experience / The Splash effect - Part One
Saturday, April 24, 2010 (18:14:01)
Posted by jason
I have been running the Simple Centrifuge rotor for about two years. Originally I ran a single rotor at about 2 gallons per hour with great success. I acquired a second rotor and bumped my flow up to 4 gallons per hour.
My process includes pre-filtering the oil at 600 microns then heating to 180-200 degrees. Then it gravity feeds into the centrifuge at a rate of 2 gallons per hour per rotor (4 gallons/hour). I had noticed the splash effect from the beginning but chalked it up to just being part of the process.
The biggest issue I had was dealing with food that was cooked in corn meal. The corn meal floats on oil and when the oil is fed into the rotor the splash effect causes the floating corn meal to
splash out of the rotor and onto the side of the box. As with the corn meal, some of the other food items in the oil were not getting trapped in the rotor because they were getting splashed out.
To the naked eye the splash effect is not present... and is very difficult to detect. It is more detectable by the ear as you can hear the oil splashing around in the rotor before it is absorbed into the oil in the rotor.
Click the images for a LARGER view (larger images are approx. 2mb in
size)
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I had this issue at 2 gallons per hour aand 4 gallons per hour
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This is how much food is trapped in the first rotor after 20 gallons of moderatly used wvo.
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The oil then flows into a second roto to be "polished". You get the same effect
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And this is all the food that the first rotor missed. (20 gallons "cleaned")
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So as you can see, the original design of the Simple Centrifuge (and all of the copy cat rotors out there) lets a lot of food out of the rotor requiring a second or third pass.
I called Simple Centrifuge and ordered the new rotor design. It has four times the surface area and the new feed cone which feeds the oil into a body of oil spinning at the same rate... thus ZERO splash. They were quite busy filling orders (a sign of a good company and great product) and as always, they provide excellent customer support. I will be making a new box (hopefully out of 6061 aluminum) and setting it up in my system. I will run the same quality of oil at the same temp and same rate. I will also keep the second rotor in place to see what the new design "misses", if anything, and the effect on the oil.
Here are some sample photos of the new rotor.
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