Energy, exergy and techno-economic analysis for biobutanol production: a multi-objective optimization approach based on economic and environmental criteria

摘要

Currently, butanol obtained by fermentation is considered as potential biofuel. In this work, it has been simulated and optimized a process to produce acetone, butanol and ethanol by means of lignocellulosic material. To accomplish this task, initially, it was planned the raw material selection, followed by the simulation in MATLAB of simultaneous saccharification, fermentation and separation reactor (SFS) and finally, the stream coming from fermentation was purified. The separation stage was selected from three different options to purify that effluent. The entire process was evaluated under a robust optimization process considering environmental, economic and energetic objective functions by means of a hybrid stochastic method, differential evolution with tabu list. The obtained results showed that the best scheme to produce and purify butanol was the SFS-3C, which considers thermally coupled columns to purify acetone, butanol and ethanol. In general terms, it was obtained as result 0.138 $/kg~(butanol), 0.132 points/kg~(butanol)and 66.8 regarding to the total annual cost, environmental impact and exergy efficiency, respectively.