Energy Saving Processes of Biofuel Production from Fermentation Broth

Abstract

The energy used for distillation in bioethanol production reaches the 40 % of the total energy demand. The pervaporation is an important alternative process to distillation that can be applied as a hybrid process or even as a single process to produce high quality biofuel. It will be shown how the energy demand, MJ/kg_Ethanol energy, can be saved applying pervaporation process with different separation factors and operating modes. It is stated that relatively high separation factor is needed to lower the energy demand below a simple distillation column.