UIC GmbH (Alzenau, Germany) announced that, at a customer’s request, it has developed, designed and supplied the world’s largest short-path evaporator, with a 2.6-m inner diameter, 80 m² of heating surface, a total height of 16 m and a total volume of 70 m3. Consisting of 12,500 individual parts, the system was outfitted for 78-bars design pressure. The areas of application for large short-path evaporators are the polymer, lactic acid, fish oil and edible-oil industries. Typical applications of short path evaporators are the separation of pesticides, monomers, mineral-oil residues and heavy boilers with a dark color.
UIC has delivered the world’s largest short-path evaportor system (Source: UIC)
Short path distillation is the method of choice for these challenging applications because it is performed under vacuum, which lowers the boiling points. This allows gentle distillation at lower temperatures, avoiding the risk of thermal degradation and unwanted byproducts.
UIC collaborated with the customer from the beginning of the process development, conducting several tests in laboratories, first on glass laboratory equipment and then on stainless steel pilot plants, to determine the optimal distillation technology and parameters. These efforts, coupled with the customer‘s production volume, led to the design, construction and delivery of the record-breaking evaporator. Commissioning took place in September 2024.
In addition to the evaporator, UIC also supplied upstream product treatment process and a sophisticated cold-trap system. To achieve the extremely low operating pressures the company in-stalled a robust and high performing vacuum pump system consisting of multiple pump stages. ƒ The short path evaporator is manufactured to be leak-proof, despite its immense size.
To guarantee the process operated with a high vacuum, the measured leakage rate was so low that, in purely mathematical terms, it would take more than four years for the pressure in the system to rise from vacuum to ambient pressure, according to UIC.