Building a still is not illegal in most states. That said, be sure to get proper clearance from your school district and your principal before you show your high school kids how to build a still and how it works for things other than making alcohol (which is illegal in most states). The supplies you will need to build your still include a drum heater and one or two empty but sealed barrel drums, some copper or heat-resistant plastic tubing, sucrose (sugar water), and maybe a couple of handmade steel trivets to support the barrels and keep them from touching the counter or floor while the sucrose is cooking. Then construct the still as instructed below.
Fill One Drum and Connect It to the Other
- Take about twenty to thirty gallons of sucrose (sugar water, which is easy enough to acquire from any science and education supply catalog) and pour it through a funnel into the opening of the first drum.
- Then take your tubing and wind it down through the opening until you can feel it touch the bottom. This should be an especially long, coiled piece of tubing so that it can reach the bottom of the first drum and then wind downward into the second drum.
- Before you move on, make sure the drums are both sitting on trivets or a surface material that will not overheat or catch fire, since this experiment will stretch over a week or more before you can show the results to your students.
- Seal up the opening of the first drum so that the steam can only escape through the tubing.
- Insert the loose end of the tubing into the opening on the top of the second drum and seal the opening around the tubing.
- The second drum should sit lower than the first drum so that gravity does its job with the moisture caught in the tubing.
Wrap the Drum Heater Around the First Drum and Set It
Now, take your blanket drum heater and wrap it all the way around the first drum (the one with the sucrose in it). Secure the drum heater, plug it in, and crank up the heat settings. Because you do not need to heat anything more complex than sucrose, the maximum temperature on most drum heaters (between 120 and 180 degrees Fahrenheit) is sufficient enough for this experiment. Now you can let the distillation process take its course.
Know Why You Should Use Drums and Blanket Drum Heaters
This is the safest method of creating a still and demonstrating the distillation process because the drum heater will not hurt any student that touches it by accident. You do not need to light a fire to crank up the temperature either because you are heating a sucrose solution that cooks and then evaporates at a lower temperature. Additionally, the use of a blanket drum heater means you can allow this experiment to run overnight and during after-school hours with no worries about starting a fire.
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