The production of butanol as biofuel or for the replacement of ethanol seems to be an attractive option as butanol contains more energy and is less volatile than ethanol. Butanol and ethanol are produced by fermentation of agricultural products such as corn, wheat, sugar cane, etc ... However, the main disadvantage ofproducing these bioalcools from agricultural products depends on the availability of the resources and sorne their production costs.
To prevent using the aforementioned agricultural products, sorne studies tested other types of wastes such as the municipal, industrial and agro-industrial wastes to produce biofuels. However, these wastes are not easily fermentable and require preliminary treatment to help solubilising their sugars necessary for the fermentation step. Severa! types of treatments have been presented in the literature but none of them gave results in terms of sugars yield, economie feasibility and presence of inhibitors.
The research presented in this thesis proposes a new approach of treatment of agro-industrial wastes to enable in a subsequent step to ferment the sugar into alcohol. This new technique consists in using steel-slags to improve the alkalinity of wastes to optimize the butanol production. In this thesis the agro-industrial waste used are sludge from fish farming and the bar ley slop from a brewery.
Steel-Slags are used under various concentrations in order to determine the optimal parameters of the treatments. The success of the treatment was measured by carrying out fermentation in batch of the treated by-products. The results of this study showed an increase in soluble sugar by 20-25% in the dissolved fraction. The results show that this new approach could be attractive in the treatment of the industrial wastes. However, after the treatment, the chemical analysis of elements such as the nitrogen and the phosphorus show a strong decline of concentration by 64%-81%. Nevertheless, other studies should be carried out in order to validate the process and with different type of waste.
| Date | 13 Sept 2010 |
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| Original language | French |
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| Awarding Institution | - École de technologie supérieure
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| Supervisor | Patrice Seers (Supervisor) & Lynda Bouagache (Co-supervisor) |
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Guemfing Simo, R. (Author),
Seers (Supervisor) & Bouagache (Co-supervisor),
13 Sept 2010Student thesis: Master's thesis › Master in Engineering: Engineering