Monday, April 30, 2007
3-25

Continuous production of ethanol from sugar cane molasses using yeast immobilized in pectin gel

Raquel de Lima Camargo Giordano, Chemical Engineering Department, Universidade Federal de São Carlos, Washington Luiz, Km 235, Monjolinho, São Carlos, SP, Brazil and Willibaldo Schmidell Netto, Chemical Engineering Department, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina - UFSC, Trindade, Florianópolis, SC, Brazil.

A continuous process to produce ethanol from sugar cane molasses using Saccharomyces cerevisiae immobilized in pectin gel is presented. The bio-catalyst was packed in a three fixed-bed reactors system, with two intermediate purges for CO2. This work aimed at studying the stability of this system for high ethanol concentrations and the influence of the bed density on the process performance. Experiments were performed at 300C, and initial substrate concentration in the feed ranging from 182.5 g/L to 234.0 g/L. Continuous operation was tested up to 16 days. Bed porosity ranged from 0.83 in the first run, to 0.53, in the third one. Stable operation was achieved for ethanol concentrations up to 86.6 g/L, with ethanol productivity of 21.7 g /L/h. The best results were obtained using initial yeast load of 0.05 g wet yeast/mL in each reactor, corresponding to an initial bed porosity of 0.53.

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