Engineers devise new process to improve efficiency of ethanol production

Chemical Engineers of Carnegie Mellon University have devised a new process that can improve the efficiency of ethanol production, a major component in making biofuels, a significant part of the energy supply, the university announced on Friday.

Researchers have used advanced process design methods combined with mathematical optimization techniques to reduce the operating costs of corn-based bio-ethanol plants by more than 60 percent.

Corn is the most often used to produce ethanol, but it can be made from grains, sugar beats, potato and beverage wastes and switchgrass.

The key to the Carnegie Mellon strategy involves redesigning the distillation process by using a multi-column system together with a network for energy recovery that ultimately reduces the consumption of steam, a major energy component in the production of corn-based ethanol.

"This new design reduces the manufacturing cost for producing ethanol by 11 percent, from $1.61 a gallon to $1.43 a gallon," said Professor Ignacio E. Grossmann. "This research also is an important step in making the production of ethanol more energy efficient and economical."

For a long time, corn-based ethanol was considered a questionable energy resource. In the United States, ethanol production began in the late 1980s with a handful of plants producing about 170 million gallons.

More than 25 years later, the industry has 107 plants that produced more than 5 billion gallons last year. And now, 46 percent of U.S. gasoline contains some percentage of