How It Works Going Green Is Easy

Bioethanol Production from Sugar Molasses: A Simple Overview

1. Pretreatment:

• Start with sugar molasses, which is a leftover from sugar-making.
• Thin out the molasses to the right thickness.
• Tweak the acidity to set up for fermentation.

2. Fermentation:

• Move the treated molasses into a special container.
• Mix in yeast, usually Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
• The yeast turns sugar into ethanol. This is monitored by checking temperature and acidity.

3. Distillation:

• Take the watery ethanol mix from fermentation.
• Heat it up to split ethanol away from the rest.
• Since ethanol evaporates quicker, it turns into vapor first.
• Cool down the vapor, and you get liquid ethanol.

4. Dehydration:

• The ethanol still has a bit of water in it.
• Use special methods (like molecular sieves or special distillation) to dry it out.
• This makes the ethanol even purer.

5. Rectification (Sometimes Needed):

• This is an extra cleaning step.
• More distillation is done to get rid of unwanted stuff and boost ethanol strength.

6. Sugar Cane Harvest

7. Denaturing (Only if Needed):

• If the ethanol is for industry or fuel, it’s made undrinkable.
• Add things like gasoline so people can’t drink it. This keeps it safe from misuse.