distillation at room temperature....
 

could this be the way to make ethanol a commercially and energy viable fuel?

Hi-tech 'wonder material' graphene has an unexpected use - it can distill vodka at room temperature | Mail Online

Whoa... Thats cool... And freaky...

yep, pretty cool. i suspect it is due to water being a relatively small molecule and polar.

I'd suspect that its due more to polarity than size. If it was just size based it would let smaller molecules through, like oxygen and hydrogen on their own.... But it blocks those.....

ah.... right.

i wonder if the material has some electrical properties, other than conduction. as in, does the water pass due to an inducted current, or something like that.

edit: isn't oxygen polar, also?

As a gas oxygen forms 02 due to its polarity, and making it less reactive....

gotcha. its been over a decade since i had chemistry.

Don't worry, we get much more complex than this and I'll be breaking out the text books. I may have had 2 years of college chemistry, but thats still some confusing stuff.....

Can you clarify? Oxygen is non-polar.

Polar is the wrong term. Oxygen is charged, it forms O2 in an effort to stabilize itself.

I read about this a while back, they were talking about the conductivity of it, and having cell phones you could roll up like a pencil and put in your pocket.

In their example, they removed water from vodka.
The article states that "it blocks all liquids and gases except water."

So, this could not be used for distillation from mash, as the water would pass through the graphene and leave behind the alcohol, fusil oils, organic material, etc.

I suspect you could take mash, run it through filters to remove solids, then through the membrane, but I suspect the resulting fluid might be , ah, er less than 'optimum'. :rolleyes:

Best
Les

yep, run it through a filter. the fusel oils (long chain alcohols) are flammable. doubt that a mash is distilled prior to filtering.

less than desirable for a beverage, for sure. for fuel, perfect.

LOL we have a low temperature distillation unit where I work that processes 3/4 million gallons a day.
This particular distillation tower operates at lower than atmospheric pressure which reduces the boiling points of the liquid inside, and the energy required to seperate it by boiling point.

This is what the vac distillation tower looks like. You don't want to know what something like that costs new:

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1338329034.jpg

imagine if you used that membrane and a vacuum. i bet it could be done with zero heating.

that is some cool equipment, sammy.