Ethanol production in small- to medium-size facilities
Abstract
In early 1980 system design criteria were developed for a small-scale ethanol production plant. The plant was eventually installed on November 1, 1980. It has a production capacity of 30 liters per hour; this can be increased easily (if desired) to 60 liters per hour with additional fermentation tanks. Sixty-six test runs were conducted to date in the alcohol production facility. Feedstocks evaluated in these tests include: corn (28 runs); grain sorghum (33 runs); grain sorghum grits (1 run); half corn/half sorghum (1 run); and sugarcane juice (3 runs). In addition, a small bench-scale fermentation and distillation system was used to evaluate sugarcane and sweet sorghum feedstocks prior to their evaluation in the larger unit. In each of these tests, evaluation of the following items was conducted: preprocessing requirements; operational problems; conversion efficiency (for example, liters of alcohol produced per kilogram of feedstock); energy balance and efficiency; nutritional recovery from stillage; solids separation by screw press; chemical characterization of stillage including liquid and solids fractions; wastewater requirements; and air pollution potential.
- Publication:
-
NASA STI/Recon Technical Report N
- Pub Date:
- April 1982
- Bibcode:
- 1982STIN...8322807H
- Keywords:
-
- Ethyl Alcohol;
- Fuel Production;
- Industrial Plants;
- Air Pollution;
- Chemical Composition;
- Corn;
- Distillation;
- Evaluation;
- Fermentation;
- Sorghum;
- Sugar Cane;
- Waste Water;
- Energy Production and Conversion