Ethanol production at industrial scale – Pakistan oil and gas sector update

Ethanol production at industrial scale – Pakistan oil and gas sector update

This ethanol production includes an intermediate tank, an evaporator and a distillation column. The ethanol from the fermentors stores in the intermediate tank due the batch processing method adopted in the design of ethanol fermentation, however, the distillation
section is running in a continuous process, certain pressure and temperature which operating in the distillation column would not be easy to achieve as well as the equilibrium behaviour if that is a batch system.

In the outlet flow of the intermediate tank, 227406 kg per hour of ethanol and water mixture are pumped into the evaporator in order to have a requirement of 0.13 mass fraction of ethanol in the top product flow, that is, 102332 kg per hour. Steam is the
heating agent for this evaporator. After the evaporator, a condenser is located for condensing the vapour into liquid, and then pumped into a distillation column for further water extraction.

The process safety describes the flammability of ethanol and a full technical list of material data was provided.

The aim of this report is to design a distillation section which belongs to a plant that produces 104 million tons of 99.5% w/w purity of ethanol per year. The distillation section runs in continues process and generally this section includes an intermediate
tank which store the ethanol and water mixture produce from fermentors vessels, the capacity of the intermediate tank is 5544 m³.

In addition,  an evaporator is set up after the intermediate tank for the first equipment which has a flow rate 227406 kg/h, under atmospheric pressure and 98.4
^oC in the distillation section. The second equipment is a distillation column. The inlet flow of the distillation column is 102332 kg/h that contain 0.13 mass fraction of ethanol. The objective of this distillation column is to produce 94% w/w purity
of ethanol and water mixture in order to pass the impurity to a pervaporation device for further distillation.

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Posted by Ahmed Tariq on Nov 3 2011. Filed under Pakistan, Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry