ETHANOL PRODUCTION

ASPEN
SIMULATION
OF
ETHANOL
PRODUTION
FROM
MOLASSES

Introduction

Ethanol is mostly used as fuel and has become an

alternative of renewable energy source now-a-days.
Ethanol is an eco-friendly alternative to petroleumbased fuel as it has fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
The production of ethanol is growing day by day at a
great extent for its versatile application and demand.
As the supply and price of oil and gas worldwide has
become a major problem, ethanol is taking place as
an alternative. Worldwide ethanol production as fuel
reached 32.35 billion gallons in 2012. Ethanol is
obtained by the fermentation process where the sugar
content in juices and honey of crops are transformed
into alcohol using yeast.

Introduction

Ethanol production can largely be increased if

fermentation process is updated. Simulation of
this process can be performed form which new
ideas for increasing production and minimizing
cost can be achieved as computer based
simulation has been very popular now-a-days for
different chemical engineering purposes.
Though simulation dont give exact process
description but it gives the very close idea to the
real life process so we are assuming few data in
this simulation and than we simulate by using
Aspen Plus version 8.8 that is available in VIT lab.

OBJECTIVE
To

find the process output.

Boiler and condenser duty.
To find the effect of temperature on
the Ethanol production.

Reactions Involved
Two

reactions involve with this process,

one is for fermentation and another is
for conversion of fructose to ethanol.
C12H22O11 + H2O = 2C6H12O6
C6H12O6 = 2C2H5OH + 2CO2
Catalyst of fermentation reaction is
invertase enzyme from yeast and
Catalyst of ethanol conversion reaction
is zymase

Process Flowsheet

Process Description

Dissolved sugar from ground up molasses is diluted

by mixing water with it. Sulfuric acid is added with
diluted sugar to prevent bacterial contamination.
Fermentation: Yeast is added with the diluted sugar
to provide invertase and zymase enzymes. The
sucrose of this diluted sugar is degraded by enzyme
while the glucose and fructose is converted into
ethanol and carbon-dioxide, with conversion rate
upto 95%.
CO2 washing : This gaseous stream is sent to
CO2Washer which is an absorption column. Here
ethanol is absorbed by wash water while CO2 leaves
as a gaseous stream.

Process Description

Ethanol Distillation : The liquid stream leaving the

fermenter is a very dilute ethanol solution which
also contains some sucrose, glucose, fructose and
sulfuric acid. This stream is sent to the
Concentration Tower which is a stripping column
using superheated steam as the stripping gas. The
gaseous stream emerging from top of the tower is
sent to Light Purification Tower which uses partial
condenser. By this stream rest of the CO2 gas is
vented to atmosphere, which was not removed by
the CO2 Washer. The liquid stream leaving the
bottom of this tower is a dilute ethanol solution with
no other component.

 We

have got the information about

percentage composition of Molasses
that is
Component Mole fraction (%)
Water
83.63
Sucrose 6.27
Fructose 10.1

Refrence (Simulation of Ethanol

to equilibrium because the components involved in the process have characteristics of polarity and electrolytes, besides operating
st
to equilibriumofbecause
components involved in the process have characteristics of polarity and electrolytes, besides operati
y Fermentation
Molassestheand
by Fermentation of Molasses and

PROPERTY METHOD
SELECTION
)

AspenPhysPropMet
hodsV7_3-Ref.pdf

We

have found that the NRTL model

fits best to equilibrium because the
components involved in the process
have characteristics of polarity and
electrolytes, besides operating
conditions in the process is less than
10 bar.
Refrence ( Simulation of Ethanol
Production by Fermentation of
Molasses and this file)
AspenPhysPropMet
hodsV7_3-Ref.pdf

FLOWSHEET

FLOWSHEETING
And

according to reaction we have to use a

Requlibrium Reactor ( Fermentation unit or
Fermenter) because given reaction is an
equlibrium reaction and we dont have
necesseray information about kinetics of the
reaction . We defined the reaction in reaction
Setup | Reaction tab . Aspen take the
reactant coefficients as negative and product
coefficients as positive . Because reaction is
occurring in series so we have to specify it in
Reaction tab.

FLOWSHEETING

RESULT AND
DISCUSSION
After

simulatin the reactor part we got

two streams REACTOR1 and REACTOR2 .
REACTR1 is the top stream or vapour
stream and the REACTOR2 is bottom
stream or liquid stream.
REACTOR1 :
REACTOR1 is send to RadFrac distillation
colum where we use few trial and found
the suitable condition like reflux ratio,
oprating pressure etc

RESULT AND
DISCUSSION
Product

detail from the

reactor(BLOCK B) and Radfrac
column B4 are given in the next
slide.

RESULT AND
DISCUSSION

RESULT AND
DISCUSSION
Now

from stream result we can see

that B4 TOP is mostly CO2 so we
didnt account that for further
process.
Than we take B4BOT we send it to
one more distillation process (BLOCK
B6)with having high recycle ratio ,
more number of stages (12).
Results of streams are in next slide

RESULT AND
DISCUSSION

RESULT AND
DISCUSSION
As

we can see that most of Ethanol

is seprated near about 90%.

RESULT AND DISCUSSION

REACTOR2

:
We send REACTOR2 stream to block
B3
That decrease the pressure of the
stream so that sepration can be
easily possible.
And the stream sended to the
distillation column B5 and then we
get 2 streams with seprated Ethanol
as a vapour stream from top of the

RESULT AND
DISCUSSION

RESULT AND
DISCUSSION
Reboiler

duty and condenser for B4

distillation column is given below in
next slide:

RESULT AND
DISCUSSION

CONCLUSION
We

increase the temperature from

30 to 60 Degree c we get less
product it means with increasing in
temperature the conversion is
decreasing. That is in next slide:

CONCLUSION