Bioethanol Production from Anacardium occidentale Fruit Juiceand Preparation of Blended Fuel Using In-house Developed Bioreactor

摘要

Ethanol has been known for a long time, being perhaps the oldest product obtained through traditional biotechnology. In the present research work, bioreactor was designed to produce bioethanol from Anacardium occidentale using Zymomonas mobilis MTCC 2427. A minimum requirement bioreactor was designed for the mass production of ethanol. Anacardium occidentale substrate was pretreated, total and reducing sugar concentrations were determined and found to be 3.4 mg/mL and 1.8 mg/mL, respectively. During fermentation the bacterial load, sugar content and ethanol content were analyzed for five days, where the highest concentration of ethanol (28%) was obtained on the third day of fermentation and the corresponding bacterial load was 15x103CFU. Ethanol obtained from the fermentation studies were further analyzed by FT-IR. The obtained ethanol was blended with petrol in different concentrations E5%, E10%, E15% and E20% respectively and successfully tested in four stroke engine.