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

近年来，丁醇作为生物质生产的生物燃料受到了研究人员和产业界的关注。随着经济原油资源的枯竭，化石燃料需求的增加，二氧化碳积累和油价高度波动等环境挑战，是人们对生物燃料产生巨大兴趣的一些原因。安倍发酵生产丁醇可能是一种很好的生物燃料替代品，因为它的燃料特性更接近汽油，被认为是一种比乙醇更好的生物燃料。然而，要使丁醇成为经济上可行的利用发酵的生物燃料，还有重大的挑战需要克服。其中一些挑战是需要廉价的原料，改进发酵性能以实现更高的最终丁醇浓度和更高的产率，有效的溶剂回收方法，以及水循环。这可以通过在发酵过程中原位回收丁醇来实现，以允许发酵进一步进行。适用于这种选择性回收过程的一种技术是膜渗透汽化。为了改善生物燃料的渗透汽化分离性能，提高生产效率，需要一种具有最高性能的致密膜，如PDMS。Petro SepTM是水处理和各种膜分离技术领域的领先公司，包括真空膜蒸馏、渗透汽化、反渗透、超滤和微滤。Petro SepTM公司感兴趣的主要领域之一是渗透汽化分离过程，特别是用于分离有机溶剂，如作为生物燃料的乙醇和丁醇

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