Design and modelling of novel process of continuous fermentation for bioethanol production

Abstract

The bioethanol is considered as alternative to swap fossil fuels in transportation, although its potential is blocked by its higher production cost compared to gasoline. The most important challenge in bioethanol research to address is reducing production cost by improving the process performance and efficiency. There are some pathways to overcome this challenge such as in-situ product removal, cell immobilization, and using disruptive reactor geometries. Therefore, disruptive reactor designs in coil tube and CFI geometries are proposed and simulated to understand its improvements compared to conventional straight tubular reactors. To analyze the performance of the proposed reactor design, a complete simulation study is done with the intention to identify the secondary flow and flow inversion effects in the fermentation process. Furthermore, an integrated continuous fermentation systems based on the proposed reactors coupled with pervaporation membrane are proposed and analyzed to determine its technical feasibility. The proposed coil tube and CFI reactors present improved mixing effects provoked by the presence of secondary flow and flow inversion which led to higher conversion rate, product concentration, and productivity, compared to the conventional reactors. And the integrated fermentation systems can offer an enhanced process productivity. Additionally, a statistical analysis was carried out with the simulations results with the intention of generating heuristic and design rules to be used to simplifying the design and operation of the proposed fermentation processes.