It is time to move away from our makeshift heating chamber and build something a little better. The idea is that we do not loose heat unnecessarily, when heating the reactor with a flame. The reactor is placed in an enclosure that lets the flame evenly engulf the reactor and is insulated not only from the sides but also from the bottom and the top. Before we were simply using expended concrete blocks to build a rectangular enclosure, but the insulation of this construction was not really good, leaving a lot of gaps and not surrounding the reactor evenly. For the new chamber, we used sheet metal from the back of old lighting panels to build a round enclosure, which we then wrapped in glass-wool insulating material.
We cut a hole for the flame to enter and bent the sheet metal around a piece of expended concrete, which serves as a bottom of the heating chamber. To fix everything in place, we used studs. Finally we closed the top off with a round piece of glass-wool wrapped in aluminum foil, something that could benefit from further improvement.
And that`s the final product in action.
For our first trial of this new heating chamber, we were actually able to move to a less powerful flame, before used to make crème brûlée, because of the nice insulating effect of the chamber.
Now that the heat of the flame is more insulated from the outside, we can also start controlling the temperature of the outlet tube. This will be useful to control the condensation of certain boiling point fractions of our product.