What are the thoughts on trying something like this? I was thinking that the steam could pass through the smaller inner tubes and hooking this up to my glycol chiller to run through the inside of larger tube. This type of condenser is used in larger applications like power plants where they condense their steam from their combustion turbine and then recirculate and reheat it for the steam turbine. This would eliminate the use of having a water spray system. Would the glycol chiller provide enough cooling to condense the steam and provide the vacuum?
There are variables to consider. In the pics you show I can't see where either the steam or the glycol would flow--the tubes look like they are sealed tightly to each other--but if there was space between them, I think it would work.
The determining factors would be how quickly the glycol system could recover, the rate of flow of the glycol through the tubes, and the amount of steam being produced. The steam from a rolling boil has a lot more heat energy produced for the steam slayer to cool than a simmer.
You could calculate the number of BTUs needed, I think--In my system, with a fairly rigorous boil, the effluent was about 140 degrees. I was boiling off 1 gallon per hour, and the water spray is about 9 gph. The water starts out about 50 degrees or so. It takes a BTU to raise a pound of water 1 degree fahrenheit (about--that's at 39 degrees IIRC, but close enough for purposes here). Ten gallons is 84.3 pounds. Nine gallons is 75.06 pounds.
This is where it's early, I haven't had enough coffee, and I'm sure there's an engineer out there who can more accurately figure this out, but I'm thinking that if 75.06 pounds of water is raised in temperature from 50 to 140, that would be a capture of (75.06 pounds of water x 90 degrees of temp change) of 6755 BTUs of energy.
Engineers, is that at least in the ballpark? Or has the lack of coffee sapped my brainpower?
So my thinking (such as it is) is that you'd need at least 6755 BTUs of glycol cooling power to do this, spread out over an hour's time. I have a Penguin chiller; at 28 degrees it's rated at 2850 BTUs (presumably per hour), at 38 degrees it's rated at 3580 BTUs; what would it be at 200 degrees? It recovers very, VERY fast, so I'm guessing that chiller would produce enough cooling (by far, actually) to be able to do this, given proper geometry of the steam slayer and tubing.
I'm with
@ancientmariner52 on this; it seems like a Rube Goldberg way of accomplishing what the steam slayer already does. It would save 9 gallons of water, and if you have no source of water it would work where otherwise nothing would, but how would the added complication make it a better option?
Interesting idea, though.