PITTSBURGH, Jan. 29 (UPI) -- U.S. engineers have found a way to improve ethanol production, thereby helping ensure biofuels become a significant part of the U.S. energy supply.
Carnegie Mellon University chemical engineers say they 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.
The technology involves redesigning the distillation process by using a multicolumn system and 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 Grossmann, who completed the research with graduate students Ramkumar Karuppiah, Andreas Peschel and Mariano Martin. "This research also is an important step in making the production of ethanol more energy efficient and economical.''
Although corn-based ethanol once was questionable energy resource, 46 percent of U.S.-produced gasoline now contains ethanol. The federal government has mandated 5 percent of the nation's gasoline supply -- roughly 7.5 billion gallons -- much contain some ethanol by 2012.
