The raw materials I'm using are pineapples, bananas and mangoes.
I’m thinking of using a rotary evaporator. Is that good enough? if that so, what's the best temperature, rotation, and duration for the distillation process?
#bioethanol #distillation #fermentation #chemicalengineering #biofuels
Rotary evaporators extract solvents at low temperatures with a high degree of repeatability and efficiency. The water bath is deployed at 39 to 40 degrees with an ethanol vapor temperature 15-20 degrees C. Lower water bath temperatures prevent thermal decomposition. Increasing the evaporation rate by lowering the vacuum and/or increasing the water bath temperature can lead to a capacity overload on the condenser. The duration depends on the volume and rotation speed, Basically 5 minutes for 100 ml volume
Dear Amir, it depends on the degree of ethanol you want to produce. Normally ethanol is produced by continuous fractional distillation, because the solution (wine) has a low concentration. Ethanol and water are so polar that they contract their volume in its mixture and is not so good to separate in a easy way See any ethanol water equilibrium curve on the literature, as for example, the graph on http://unifac.ddbst.de/en/EED/VLE/VLE%20Ethanol%3BWater.php
. Batch distillation is very ineffective to produce high content ethanol, but it is ok to produce an ethanol around 40 GL. Vaccum or pressure has a low effect on ethanol water misture distillation, so rotary evaporator can be used, but it is a batch distillation and you have to collect a small portion of distillate. If you have a vigreux collumn will help to get a more concentrated ethanol. Another possibility is to use a batch distillation collumn in total reflux until top and botton temperature are constante. at this moment you can drain the collumn content until top temperature reachs say 5 degrees more. Then stop draining and put is on reflux again. repeat the process. at each phase separate the distillate, because the ethanol content will be lower in each step. good luck
by the way, there is no need to use vaccumm because ethanol does not suffer therma degradation
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