Hi, this is Walter from ENCON Evaporators, and what you're looking at is a 2000 gallon per hour MVC evaporator. This unit's heat source is steam, but electric is also available. Now, this unit is in the final stages of quality control testing, so it's not 100% assembled. For example, the railings are not attached to the walkways above. What I'd like to do is show you how this MVC evaporator works, and I'll do a quick walkaround and look at some of the components. But, first, I'd like to discuss a little bit of the theory of how this unit works.
What I have here is a little flow diagram, and it's hard to read on the screen, but what you have here is your feed liquid, comes in through a feed pump, and goes into a feedstock heat exchanger, then flows upward into the separation tank. Once this separation tank fills, the recirculation pump will turn on, and the liquid will flow round through a main heat exchanger. Now, when the unit is first turned on, steam will be flowing through the other side of this heat exchanger, heating our feed liquid. If this is an electric unit, an electric heater would be located to heat the liquid as it comes in, and the liquid goes back in the separation tank, and it continually circulates. As it heats up the boiling, steam will rise and go into a vapor compressor.
Now, this vapor compressor collapses the steam, making it hotter. That's sort of like a pressure cooker in a way except we're doing it mechanically. This superheated steam will now flow down and go into our main heat exchanger. Now, as the pressure rises from our vapor compressor and our superheated steam, the incoming steam will shut off, and the system will be heated just by the superheated steam. As the pressure drops, if it gets cooler, the steam will turn back on to heat it back up again. Now, the superheated steam goes through the main heat exchanger, giving up its heat for the feed liquid, and by the time it comes out the other side, it will be very hot, distilled water. This distilled water will flow down in the distillate tank and then flow down into the feedstock heat exchanger, which heats the incoming liquid, and then your cooled down distillate will be pumped up.
Now, let's look at the same thing but on the actual unit. Now, one of the nice things about this unit, there's a good amount of space to move around, so you can come inside and do maintenance or repairs very easily and reach everything. You see the pipes there, at the very end, that's where the feed liquid will come in, and it will flow along to the feed pump, and it's hard to see on the video. It flows up, around, down into the feedstock heat exchanger. Get a good view of it here. Now, this feedstock heat exchanger is made up of many plates inside, and what happens is the liquid, the feed liquid, flows in and goes through a tortuous path through all these different plates. And as the unit is running, the heated distillate will go through here and heat up this feed liquid. After it flows through, that liquid will flow out, go up and over. And you can see that pipe goes up and into that big pipe way up there on the top.
Now I'll show you on the outside where it goes from there. Now, that feed liquid goes into this big pipe here, which flows right into that big separation tank. Now, as that tank fills up, this recirculation pump turns on, the feed liquid flows out through here, through the pump, and into the main heat exchanger. Now, this main heat exchanger is basically the same thing as our feedstock one, just with an awful lot more plates. Now, as I said before, when this unit's first running, steam will be going the other way in this heat exchanger, giving up its heat and heating this liquid.
Once the unit is running and going, the superheated steam from the vapor compressor will be heating this. So, this liquid flows through there and then flows back out and back into the separation vessel. As this keeps circulating, it continues to heat up until it reaches boiling. Once it reaches boiling, the steam rises, goes out through that pipe on the top, it flows down along here and flows toward our vapor compressor. There is our vapor compressor. If you notice, there are two on this unit. This type of vapor compressor and the number of them will depend on the characteristics of the feed water itself.
Now, this compresses our steam, makes it super-heated and super-compressed. That steam comes through this pipe and into the main heat exchanger. It will now give up heat to the feed water that's circulating in our separation tank. And once it gets through here, it will be superhot, distilled water that will flow into this distillate tank. It will come out, flow along here into our feedstock heat exchanger where we'll be heating our feed liquid. That'll give up more heat when it comes out. This will be fairly hot but cooled down quite a bit. That distilled water will flow out, around, in another unit and into your distillate tank.
That's a basic overview of how this unit works. Let's just take an overview look at it. You can see the 2000 gallon per hour unit is quite big. You see here, these are some of the platforms that I was talking about. These will have railings and ladders to them when it's actually installed at the customer site. If you've noticed, we build the units, they're modular fashioned, so we can build it here, test them here, and then disassemble them into components, and ship them to the customer's location and put it together. It makes it a lot easier on the customer's side to assemble.
Now, you've probably noticed that these three large pipes are quite far away from the actual MVC unit and the separation vessel, and you probably also see that we seem to be supporting with wood here. The reason for that is, at the customer's side, the vessel will be outside, and the MVC unit itself will be inside, and obviously those pipes will be going through the wall. As you noticed, the pipes are very organized. This right here is the feed system for antifoam and anti-scaling. Now, some applications may require that. Some won't.
This right here is the control panel. In this particular unit, we're using an Allen Bradley 1250 Panel, which is touchscreen, decent size. The touchscreen is sort of nice just for the amount of data you can look at and log and also just for navigating through the menus. Even I can navigate through the menus, which I think is a programming feed. This is the internals of the aux panel right there. And there are the paper compressors once again.
One other thing I did wanna show you is the VFD units for the vapor compressors. All right, I think that is about it. I hope you enjoyed my little tour of our MVC 2000 evaporator. If you're interested in learning more about this unit from someone who really knows what they're talking about, contact us today, or call at 603-624-5110. And thank you for watching.