How much vacuum can a 55 gal drum withstand?

JohnnyJohnsoninWI · Jun 21, 2008

Do any of you know how much vacuum a steel 55-gallon drum can withstand before bucking or permanently "oil canning"?

I happen to have half a drum of old coolant, an old reciprocating vacuum pump from a dairy farm, and a generator which needs exercizing occasionally. You can guess where I'm going with this? Park the drum in the sun on a hot day and let some coolant evaporate. Pull a vacuum and really move things along, as long as the drum doesn't collapse.

I've also been on the lookout for a drum heater on ebay. Maybe I'll use both at the same time.

Any opinions out there?

Thanks,
John

mobile_bob · Jun 21, 2008

a 55 gallon drum probably will deform at or near 10" of vacuum

however an old propane tank can handle just about all the vacuum you can throw at it.

from your post i would guess you are trying to distill the antifreeze or concentrate it?

how much vacuum can your pump provide?

a gas engine at idle can provide better than 16"of vacuum
without running a pump.

be interesting to see how this works out for you.

bob g

loose rod · Jun 21, 2008

What Bob said. We tried it and they cave fast.

Mcmaster has a good drum heater for not much and worked well for the application you are looking for.

JohnnyJohnsoninWI · Jun 22, 2008

thanks and a clarification

Hi Guys,
Thanks for your replies. To clarify, I want to evaporate old water-soluble machining coolant (from my machining center), not antifreeze.

I was leaning towards the drum heater. However, given the equipment at hand, I started wondering, "what if?".

Take care,
John

J.R. Williams · Jun 22, 2008

Vac Pump

All that warm water vapor will not do the pump any good.

JRW

Toms Wheels · Jun 22, 2008

A forty degree F temperture drop collasped a drum in the storage shed. Of course non of the participants owned up to the deed.

Search Youtube for a video of collasping RR tank cars, very cool, very quick, in a instant round to flat.

Limy Sami · Jun 22, 2008

As I understand it, evaporation rate is linked to surface area and air flow, and the lower the temperature the greater influence surface area has... think salt pans.

Air flows tricky as a drums only openings on one end unless there's a side plug (unusual these days!!)

So, why not turn drum on it's side with the large plug at the top out and let nature do the job a little faster,.... water coming off as vapour will quickly dissapeer when it contacts the hot steel.

Sami retreats in to fox hole to await his thinking being torn to shreds.

Mark Rand · Jun 22, 2008

Use the other end of the pump

Get a quantity of aquarium air-bricks. Larger ones are available from the shops as well as the tiny ones. Manifold them together with plastic tube. Post them down the hole into the drum. Now connect them to the outlet of the compressor. No vacuum needed and this will give you a much higher surface area for evaporation.

On a much smaller scale (eg aquarium pump sized) using a compressor and air-bricks for a quarter hour four times a day on my grinder coolant tank has kept the anaerobic bacteria away for six months (I don't use the grinder enough for natural aeration to do the job). I do lose about a gallon a month of water from this use.

deltap · Jun 22, 2008

I charge low pressure water chillers with R-11 as part of my work. It is shipped in 200# drums about 1/3 the size of a 55 gal. drum. Operating pressure on the chiller is 16" Hg. The drum oil cans a bit at this press., but does not collapse. Larger containers I suspect would collapse sooner. Evaporation is just a lower temp. boiling process and still requires addition of heat to make it work. Industries that do use a combination of heat and lower pressure to remove water from product do so to maintain product quality as in drugs, dairy, and other foods.

Joe D Grinder · Jun 22, 2008

In my (unfortuate) experience, drums do not "deform". They go "thwak" and collapse in about a second...Joe

HelicalCut · Jun 22, 2008

Forget the vacuum, you need to shift some really large volumes to get a decent evaporation rate. It is summer over where you are, put some concreters plastic on the ground with some 2"x4" s to form the sides and pour the coolant about 1/2" deep on the plastic, keep adding to make up for the evaporation. On a hot windy day you will be suprised how much evaporates.

jamscal · Jun 22, 2008

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_hci9vrvfw

I did the search...pretty impressive.

Norman Atkinson · Jun 22, 2008

Vacuum 55 gall drum???

Simply freeze it in smaller quantities

I discovered this by putting a can of lager in the deep freeze.

Cor??????

You can but try.

Norm

surplusjohn · Jun 22, 2008

it seems like there should be some sort of de-emulsifier that you could add to coolent and then the oils would float to the surface. At any rate, evaporating in the sun works well in the summer. I was cleaning up a shop with a couple of drums of coolent that was going to cost me lots to dispose of. there was a retangular steel tank handy, I dumped one drum drum at a time in, and set it in the sun under a overhang to keep the rain off, In the two weeks I was working at the place the slop evaporated to well under a half drum full, but then I was faced with cleaning the tank which was a mess, then mixed it with litter then into the dumpster.

Norman Atkinson · Jun 22, 2008

How much vacuum etc

Come on wake up in the back there.

It's a well established process called fractional freezing.

I only added the lager bit to see if people were awake.

Oh!

Norm

WizardOfBoz · Jun 22, 2008

Evaporation is just a lower temp. boiling process and still requires addition of heat to make it work.

Exactly. Surface area comes into play for heating (e.g. with steam, more area = more heat transfer). Increasing the surface area of the fluid/gas interface (e.g. sparging wtih air bricks, changing the orientation of the drum to get more liquid surface area) may initially increase evaporation but what happens it that greater evaporation rate cools the liquid, lowering it's vapor pressure, lower its rate of evaporation. You have to supply enough heat to boil off the coolant.

You are proposing distillation, specifically vacuum distillation, and this is generally only used when you have heat-sensitive components (flavors and fragrance mfrs do this a lot). Probably not cost effective for coolant.

A 1500W band heater, even if it gives you 50% efficiency (probably is less, unless you insulate the heater and the drum) only would boil off about 2 pounds/hour (or about .25 gallons) of water.

I don't know what's in water-soluble coolant, but you'd be wise to check the component part's boiling point, latent heat, and/or vapor pressure curves and compare them with water. If the coolant has several components, your distillation would have to be almost perfect to recover coolant that is "in spec".

Jim

atex57 · Jun 22, 2008

Buy a 5ft dia. kiddies wading pool and set it out in the sun, fill it and let evaporate. Cover it with a tarp when it rains.

Fasto · Jun 22, 2008

It sounds like you're trying to reduce the volume for disposal.
I worked at a metal finishing company in the former jewelry capital of the USA, Attleboro, MA. We finished all kinds of metals, usually with acid dips and blackening solutions. This was followed with a water rinse. The rinse water was hazardous.
To get rid of this rinse water, it was first moved to a settling tank, probably 200 gallons or so fiberglass tank with no lid. Then, they had a evaporative column. This was a tube, 4" diameter or so PVC, pointing upwards like a chimney stack. A small blower at the bottom off to the side produced airflow up the chimney. A pump and nozzle sprayed the rinse water mixture, finely atomized, up the chimney. The water evaporated and the now concentrated acids ran back down where they dripped into a second tank. This reduced the disposal from 200 gallons/day to about 2 gallons/day.
The company used a commercial product but I suspect that something could be easily home-brewed.

This process, of course, is no more complicated than vastly increasing the surface area of the liquid to be evaporated.

TMS8C8 · Jun 22, 2008

Your working too hard - just find a clump of bushes and pour it out

It sounds like you just want to dispose of it, not save the additive. If thats so, is there no hazmat place that will take it? Around here they will take various hazmat stuff for free as long as you transport with the exception of radioactive waste

jmead · Jun 22, 2008

Pulling a deep vacuum like 500 microns should boil it off. Heat will speed it up.
I don't see how that is better than pouring it on the ground, it still ends up in the environment?

How much vacuum can a 55 gal drum withstand?

Hot Rolled

Stainless

Plastic

Hot Rolled

Hot Rolled

Titanium

Diamond

Diamond

Cast Iron

Titanium

Stainless

Stainless

Titanium

Diamond

Titanium

Diamond

Stainless

Hot Rolled

Cast Iron

Hot Rolled

Similar threads