im brewing ethonal and i cant find a place to purchase zeolite to remove water so am thinking of using dry gas what do people know about this and will it work
Works well with gasoline, don’t know about ethanol. Should work though. Try it and let us know.
Dry gas is ethanol based. It is alcohol. Not sure that adding ethanol to ethanol is going to do much. Maybe I’m missing something.
It won’t work. If your still is working at its best, you will get 96.4% ethanol. If you mix dry gas (alcohol) you will just dilute the water so if you add 50% dry gas and that does not have water in it already, you will still have 1.8% water.
There are ways around it. I suspect that zeolite is what a chemist or chemical engineer would call a molecular sieve. It would be used to dry the 96% ethanol to some point above the azeotrope, removed and dried for reuse. The ethanol can them be distilled to a higher purity. There are other ways to do it, like distillation at a different pressure or adding another component like benzene. Only you can decide if any of this is practical in your shed.
Surely, you don’t want to ruin, otherwise, perfectly good moon shine by taking all of the flavor out of it?!
I was going to suggest boiling the solution on the BBQ grill to evaporate the water but another problem came to mind.
Plus, as hellokit mentions, use the solution as intended by Mother Nature and you won’t give a hoot about mileage.
Zeolite won’t get the job done. Dri-gas is useless here, since all it does is assist gasoline to absorb water. Boiling the sample is worst of all, since you will only boil away the alcohol, not the water. Your best recourse is distillation, a method that has been used for thousands of years.
It’s not only inflammable, but the ethanol will boil away first. A distillation column would work. Ethanol boils at 78.4 Celsius; water at 100 Celsius. If you distill the mixture at 79 Celsius, you should boil off the ethanol and leave the water behind. The alcohol will not burn since there are no spark sources inside the still. The flash point is 13 Celsius, so you will need to be careful.