Gas stripping–pervaporation hybrid process for energy-saving product recovery from acetone–butanol–ethanol (ABE) fermentation broth

Abstract In this study, an integrated gas stripping–pervaporation (GS–PV) process was established to enhance the butanol concentration and to reduce the cost of the product separation processes. Batch pervaporation was integrated with in situ gas stripping system of fed-batch acetone–butanol–ethanol (ABE) fermentation. A total 706.68 g/L ABE (54.2 g/L of ethanol, 169.93 g/L of acetone, and 482.55 g/L of butanol) was collected after 11 h of pervaporation separation. The recovery rates of butanol, acetone and ethanol were 98.8%, 99.5% and 82.8% (w/v), respectively. Attractively, the liquor on the permeate side of pervaporation membrane exceeded its azeotropic point which have not been achieved in previous processes basing on individual gas stripping or pervaporation. Furthermore, aiming to construct consolidate commercial guide of biobutanol producing process, GS–PV–distillation process was established and compared with traditional GS–distillation scheme. As a result, 24.83 MJ/kg of butanol was consumed in the novel GS–PV–distillation process. In this scheme, the beer column was deleted from the rectifying column series. Moreover, based on the consolidate GS–PV–distillation integration process, heat recovery network was simulated and designed by Pinch Analysis, and 1.72 MJ/kg of heat could be further saved after heat exchange in the distillation system. And the overall energy demand for butanol production was further decreased to 23.07 MJ/kg, which was only 29.2% of the conventional distillation procedure.