Continuous Ethanol Fermentation And The Flow Simulation In Silicone Rubber Membrane Bio-Reactor

Ethanol production by a continuous fermentation in silicone rubber membrane bio-reactor (SRMBR) is one of the most promising technologies for clearer-energy development. The silicone rubber membrane (SRM) used in SRMBR is a polymer-made non-porous material. It is hydrophobe and non-permeable to inorganic salt, and has the high selective ethanol permeability. Compared to the conditional separation technology, the pervaporation through SRM has the advantages of low-cost and low-pollution, especially applicable to separating volatile matter from organic matter-water system or organic-organic matter system. Although SRMBR has been widely used experimentally in the continuous ethanol fermentation, there is still a lot of research effort needed to put SRMBR into industrial application in a large scale.In this work, a membrane bioreactor with novel composite silicone rubber membrane [polydimethysiloxane (PDMS)] was developed, and used for continuous ethanol fermentation. The fermentation efficiency and membrane performance were investigated. The ethanol fermentation was performed under temperature 35℃with thermophilic alcohol active dry yeast(TH-AADY) as fermenting microorganism. The experiment has lasted 260h. It was suggested that adding glucose and separating the product-ethanol can guarantee the cell's activity and stability. At the same time, the system can work continuously. The novel PDMS membrane showed an excellent separation performance and a steadily physicochemical property. The pure ethanol–water solution obtained at the downstream of the separator contained no inorganic salt or cells.The solution flow patterns in three different membrane modules were simulated...