Reminder!

Next Seminar: April 12^th All LORRE graduate students are expected to attend.

Solvent Selection and Recovery for Liquid-Liquid Extraction of Acetic Acid and Water

Mahdieh Aghazadeh

The removal of acetic acid from biomass hydrolysate is crucial to increase the yield of ethanol during fermentation.  The acetic acid released during hydrolysis works to slow down the fermentation and significantly decrease the yield of ethanol.  The overall goal of this project is to explore the removal of acetic acid from the hydrolysate using liquid-liquid extraction (LLE).

The use of liquid-liquid extraction to remove acetic acid from water is traditionally performed with ethyl acetate.  This step is then coupled to a distillation tower to purify the acetic acid from the solvent stream.  The drawback to this method is the operational expense of the distillation column.  The use of a membrane for separation is more cost effective and possibly even more efficient.  The work performed for this study was to use Aspen Plus to determine a reasonable solvent to recover Acetic Acid from water.  The aim was to identify a solvent that has great affinity to acetic acid and low solubility in water, and also required the least extreme operating conditions as far as temperature and pH were concerned.  Once the solvent was identified, the next step was to determine the best type of membrane.  Based on the molecular size of the solvent and acetic acid and also their hydrophobicity differences, molecular sieve or zeolite-based membrane systems were tested.

Schedule for The Spring Semester

Date	Location	Seminar
January 18	Fu Room	Titles and Abstracts
February 1	Fu Room	Isaac Emery
February 15	Fu Room	Xuan Li
March 1	ADM Building	Graduate Student Poster Symposium
March 29	Fu Room	Chia-Ling Wu
April 12	Fu Room	Mahdieh Aghazadeh
April 26	Fu Room	Barron Hewetson