The production alcohols from renewable resources via fermentation, such as ethanol or n-butanol, poses important challenges. Due to product inhibition, final product concentrations are limited, leading to high downstream processing costs. Adsorptive separations using hydrophobic materials are an interesting alternative to traditional unit operations, such as distillation. In most industrial applications, product recovery by adsorption is carried out using a fixed-bed of (spherical) adsorbent particles. However, using such a system has important disadvantages. To improve mass & heat transfer characteristics, the use of particles with a smaller diameter is beneficial. Yet, decreasing the particle diameter also leads to an increase in bed pressure drops, thus limiting the particle diameter which can be used in industrial systems.  The use of adsorbent monoliths allows to uncouple the relationship between mass & heat transfer and bed pressure drop. Traditional adsorbent monoliths are usually produced via extrusion and thus limited to only containing parallel-channels. The use of 3D-printing to synthesize these adsorbent monoliths gives a much larger design freedom. In this contribution, the development of 3D-printed adsorbent monoliths (zeolites and Metal Organic Frameworks) for the recovery of renewable alcohols will be discussed. Characterization of the 3D-printed monoliths was carried out via the measurement of adsorption isotherms of the different fermentation products. The separation efficiency of these monoliths was evaluated via the performance of breakthrough experiments using model fermentation mixtures. The effect of gas velocity on butanol adsorption, as well as the effect of the regeneration temperature on the adsorption cycle time was investigated as well.

Development of 3D-printed structured adsorbents for the recovery of renewable alcohols

2019 Spring National Meeting

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