원문정보
초록
영어
Bio-ethanol, which is one of the most studied renewable alternatives, can be obtained from the fermentation of sugar, starch, cellulose-based materials. Fermented beer from those raw materials contains 8～11 v/v % of ethanol and the beer is sent to distillation process so that 95～97 v/v % of hydrous ethanol can be produced. Although the ethanol from the distillation process is used for alcoholic beverage or industrial usage, its water content should be removed by an additional dehydration process such as azeotropic distillation or pressure swing adsorption process for using ethanol as blended fuel. In this study, an investigation was carried
out on ethanol-water separation employing a PSA process with 3A zeolite as the adsorbent. The cycle of the PSA process was operated under the following variables: feed flow (80～100 L/h of 95 v/v% ethanol), adsorption temperature (110～140 ℃) and adsorption pressure (1.2 atm).
PSA process including two molecular sieve dehydration columns filled with zeolites was installed at pilot plant scale for this study. The product purity through the dehydration columns reached minimum 99.5 v/v% and this PSA process could produce more than 1.0 kL of anhydrous ethanol on a daily basis.