Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Nowadays, due to the recent instability of petroleum prices, perspectives of resource scarcity, geopolitical risks derived from petroleum dependence on political unstable countries and the most solid commitments with environmental issues, attention to alternative renewable resources for the production of the fuels and chemicals have been drawn increasingly. In this new scenario the synthesis of products through biotechnological processes makes possible to discover and explore innumerable routes of obtaining products with high aggregate value with very low environmental impact. Bearing this in mind, in this work the simulation of an intensified process for ethyl lactate production by esterification of lactic acid with ethanol using a reactive distillation system was carried out. This intensified process includes the fermentation for the lactic acid production from sucrose and, the reactive distillation process for ethyl lactate production by lactic acid esterification. To represent more realistically the lactic acid fermentation process, a simulator software, which considers a substrate and product inhibition kinetic model, was developed. This software was then embedded as a native unit operation in the intensified process simulation. In order to be embedded in the process simulation environment the developed simulation software should be in agreement with the CAPE-OPEN standards. These standards are used for interoperability and integration of process engineering software components. With this approach was possible the use of the real kinetics model, including parameters upgrading to follow changes in the feedstock, allowing a more realistic reproduction and prediction of the process.