With thin film distillation we can achieve greater reduction in the boing temperature by decreasing the operating pressure. This allows thermal separation of products that would be destroyed by conventional vacuum distillation because of necessary high temperature and long residence time.
In a Thin film evaporator the raw material is heated on the internal surface of a heated tube until lower boiling component starts to evaporate. These vapours are then liquefied on the cold tubes of a condenser. In simple thin film evaporator design the condenser is located outside but as close to the evaporator as possible.
In short path evaporator the condenser is located inside the evaporator body. Due to the different design details, short path evaporators can be used down to 0.001mBar as compared to the conventional thin film evaporators which can be used down to approximately 1 mbar. Residence time in Thin film and Short path evaporators is only few seconds.
