Dehydration of ethanol by facile synthesized glucose-based silica.

Baokun Tang, Wentao Bi, Kyung Ho Row

Department of Chemical Engineering, Inha University, Incheon 402-751, South Korea.

Applied biochemistry and biotechnology 2013 Feb

filter terms:

Bioethanol is considered a potential liquid fuel that can be produced from biomass by fermentation and distillation. Although most of the water is removed by distillation, the purity of ethanol is limited to 95-96 % due to the formation of a low-boiling point, water-ethanol azeotrope. To improve the use of ethanol as a fuel, many methods, such as dehydration, have been proposed to avoid distillation and improve the energy efficiency of extraction. Glucose-based silica, as an adsorbent, was prepared using a simple method, and was proposed for the adsorption of water from water-ethanol mixtures. After adsorption using 0.4 g of adsorbent for 3 h, the initial water concentration of 20 % (water, v/v) was decreased to 10 % (water, v/v). For water concentrations less than 5 % (water, v/v), the adsorbent could concentrate ethanol to 99 % (ethanol, v/v). The Langmuir isotherms used to describe the adsorption of water on an adsorbent showed a correlation coefficient of 0.94. The separation factor of the adsorbent also decreased with decreasing concentration of water in solution.

Citation

Baokun Tang, Wentao Bi, Kyung Ho Row. Dehydration of ethanol by facile synthesized glucose-based silica. Applied biochemistry and biotechnology. 2013 Feb;169(3):1056-68