Jones Beene wrote:
Harry Veeder wrote:
Einstein's explanation is clever but has it every been tested? Is that
how
liquid stirred in a tea cup actually flows? (see fig. 1 at
http://www.ucalgary.ca/~kmuldrew/river.html )
Dunno for sure.
But for the heck of it (and as a potential range of experiments for
science fair participants) I am trying to enrich the ethanol content of
some cheap wine with none other than tea leaves.
If the goal is to enrich the wine, rather than understand tea leaves,
considering what time of year it is, you could use the old farmer's
trick, and do it with a "cold still":
Just put a jug of the cheap stuff outside overnight, then run a red hot
poker down into the bottle to clear a channel (assuming it's frozen
right up through the neck), turn it over, and pour off the alcohol from
the middle. Supposedly this is the old-fashioned way to make applejack.
(If heating a poker red-hot seems too energy intensive -- or just too
awkward -- I suppose a long bit on an electric drill would do the job
just as well.)
'Course if you're in one of those Dixie states where the air never cools
off you won't be able to make this work.
Will also try various
other oily "media". I understand that this is unrelated to you interest
in the "flow" properties, but just forgot to mention it before.
This technique should work if the leaves (or any other material) absorbs
ethanol preferentially, displacing water. The "media" (i.e. tea leaves
or whatever) will then be removed by the filtering and can then pressed
to see if the liquid coming out later is enriched in alcohol.
There are many related patents on this technique already. A good
resource is:
http://www.chemicalvision2020.org/pdfs/sepmap.pdf
As we know, distillation is energy intensive, and it is not always
possible to use waste heat, and even when waste heat is used - why not
get 4-5 times more distillate for the same heat input?
By increasing the ethanol content of a fermentation mash from an average
of 10% to just 20% cuts the energy requirement almost in half, and
certainly there should be plenty of "water displacing" materials in nature.
SIDE note: The "WD" of the ubiquitous spray-lube called WD-40 stands for
"water-displacing." ... and next to duct-tape as a stop-gap remedy, what
real-man doesn't purchase WD-40 by the case as cure-all for nearly every
rub, as they say. You can guess what I will spray my tea leaves with in
the next run <g>
Jones
