Monday, April 29, 2013
Exhibit Hall
Ethanol is biodegradable, low in toxicity and causes little environmental pollution if spilt, also is a high octane fuel and has replaced lead as an octane enhancer in gasoline. Moreover, the hydrous ethanol fuel can be used by flexible fuel vehicles, in which its combustion produces less toxic hydrocarbon emissions than gasoline, because they have lower atmospheric reactivity. Ethanol has been increasingly viewed as the most important alternative to fossil fuels, and there are many studies to be developed in order to have a total knowledge of this theme. Even so, in Brazil several studies are being developed in order to obtain a second generation ethanol, which can be produced from biomass feedstock, for example sugarcane bagasse. Anhydrous ethanol can be obtained by different processes and an interesting alternative process for the current industry is the pervaporation separation process, which presents a significant potential for application in several environments, as the azeotropic points breaking, energetic problems, etc. In this work, experimental data of ethanol batch distillation from wine of sugarcane fermentation were performed. The experimental data were made in a Fischer Autodest 800AC distillation column, adapted for ethanol recovery. The distillate fractions containing ethanol, fusel oil and other volatile components were collected and analyzed by gas chromatography method. A simulator “PERVAP”, which was built in Fortran language, was developed for pervaporation process. Ethanol concentrations obtained by analyses were entering data for the simulator. The results were performed for each distillate fraction and the ethanol recovery was determined.