Separation of biobutanol from ABE fermentation broth via pervaporation using PDMS composite membranes

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Recently, butanol as a biofuel produced from biomass has been on the radar of researchers and industry. The increased demand of fossil fuel along with the depletion of economical crude oil resources, environmental challenges such as the accumulation of CO2 and the highly oscillating oil price are some of the reasons for the huge interest in biofuels. Butanol production from ABE fermentation could be a good biofuel alternative as it has fuel characteristics that are closer to gasoline and is considered to be a better biofuel than ethanol. However, there are significant challenges to overcome to make butanol an economically-viable biofuel using fermentation. Some of these challenges are the need for inexpensive feed-stocks, improved fermentation performance to achieve higher final butanol concentration and higher yield, an efficient method for solvent recovery, and water recycle. This can be achieved with in-situ butanol recovery during fermentation to allow the fermentation to proceed further. One technique that is suitable for this selective recovery process is membrane pervaporation. To improve the performance of the pervaporation separation of biofuels and increase the productivity, a dense membrane such as PDMS with the highest performance possible is required. Petro SepTM is a leading company in the field of treatment of water and various membrane-based separating technologies including vacuum membrane distillation, pervaporation, reverse osmosis, ultrafiltration, and microfiltration. One of the main areas of interest of the Petro SepTM Corporation is the pervaporation separation process particularly for the separation of organic solvents such as ethanol and butanol as a biofuel