TY - JOUR AU - Chen, Huidong AU - Cai, Di AU - Chen, Changjing AU - Wang, Jianhong AU - Qin, Peiyong AU - Tan, Tianwei PY - 2018 DA - 2018/10/20 TI - Novel distillation process for effective and stable separation of high-concentration acetone–butanol–ethanol mixture from fermentation–pervaporation integration process JO - Biotechnology for Biofuels SP - 286 VL - 11 IS - 1 AB - One of the major obstacles of acetone–butanol–ethanol (ABE) fermentation from renewable biomass resources is the energy-intensive separation process. To decrease the energy demand of the ABE downstream separation processes, hybrid in situ separation system with conventional distillation is recognized as an effective method. However, in the distillation processes, the high reflux ratio of the ethanol column and the accumulation of ethanol on top of the water and butanol columns led to poor controllability and high operation cost of the distillations. In this study, vacuum distillation process which is based on a decanter-assisted ethanol–butanol–water recycle loop named E-TCD sequence was developed to improve the conventional separation sequence for ABE separation. The permeate of in situ pervaporation system was used as the feed. SN - 1754-6834 UR - https://doi.org/10.1186/s13068-018-1284-8 DO - 10.1186/s13068-018-1284-8 ID - Chen2018 ER -