The Bruce got it I think, And North TX MD found the Manfacture site.
It looks like a fracturing column used for distilling.
I am not talking about alcohol but for the petroleum products.
We had what looked like a small version of this at the plant I worked at, it was part of a essence recovery system for Fruit Juice and other products.
Quick and dirty basic explanation , liquids heated to boiling make gas. Part of this gas will rise in a column where you can tap it off and run it through a condenser to turn it back into a liquid.
In our evaporators, we would quickly bring single strength fruit juice ( say fresh squeezed Pomegranate juice ) up to the boiling point using tube and tube heat exchangers. This would then flash over into a large separator. On that first pass ( first boil ) we would take some of the steam from the juice itself and run it in our little fracturing column and tap off at a point , take that steam ( this steam had very light organic liquids in it= Essence) and run that through a condenser, cool it and turn it back into a very valuable liquid.
This could be sold to other company's for flavoring, the "smell" of pomegranate, or even blended back to the concentrate to bring back the "fresh Pomegranate taste" to it that gets lost in the first boil.
Really cool stuff with lots of variables to play with/make you crazy.
73
Jeff