(365h) Investigation of Suitable Technologies & Solvents for Bio-Ethanol Dehydration with the Help of Aspen.

In the current scenario shortage of fossil fuels has become a major concern for humankind. Such conventional sources of energy have a major effect on the environment in terms of pollution. Due to this, there is an urgent need of exploring alternative sustainable sources of energy, with an ability to replace prevalent fossil fuels fulfilling the augmenting global energy demand.

In this regard, Bio-ethanol derived from sustainable sources of energy has many promising characteristics having its application as a gasoline additive. Notably, the attention of researchers, industrialists, and governments globally is shifting towards Bioethanol and its derivatives. However, the commercial exploitation of Bioethanol production is still infeasible. As per the government mandate globally, 99.6 ± 0.2 % concentration of ethanol is acceptable. Nevertheless, the formation of well-known binary Azeotrope of ethanol-water at 95.63 % ethanol achieving this purity becomes even more challenging. Therefore, a wide variety of technologies are being used globally for the purification of Bio-ethanol such as Extractive Distillation, Azeotropic Distillation, and Dehydration of ethanol using molecular sieves, etc. However, the use of molecular sieves is still improvident as compared to the other two mentioned technologies. Although the countries like Brazil and the USA, the largest producers of ethanol in the world, use Extractive Distillation with solvent Ethylene Glycol and Azeotropic Distillation with solvent Cyclohexane. Whereas these technologies at commercial scale are economically infeasible making the overall cost of Bio-ethanol way higher than non-conventional sources of energy.

Therefore, in this work, Bio-ethanol dehydration using Extractive and Azeotropic Distillation with solvents like Propylene glycol, Pentane, etc. are investigated. The study was conducted using Aspen Plus with the typical industrial considerations of feed having 5 wt.% ethanol & 95 wt.% water. The result obtained using the simulation were optimized based on operational energy and design requirements and are discussed.