Combined Heat and Power in Automobiles: Utilization of Waste Engine Heat to Drive Ethanol/Water Distillation
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Date
2011-01-01
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Department
Chemical, Biochemical & Environmental Engineering
Program
Engineering, Chemical and Biochemical
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Access limited to the UMBC community. Item may possibly be obtained via Interlibrary Loan through a local library, pending author/copyright holder's permission.
Abstract
The production of ethanol from corn is currently an energy intensive process and provides a marginal energy investment return. The final steps of ethanol purification involve distillation and dehydration, together consuming the most energy in the ethanol production process. The most practical way to reduce this energy requirement is to reduce the distillation requirement at the manufacturing level. This can be realized by the use of combined heat and power technology, in which ethanol is used as the primary fuel in an engine and provides energy to do both mechanical work and heat energy to drive the distillation of an aqueous ethanol mixture. The net energy value is the energy released from combustion divided by the energy required to create the fuel. Given a startup amount of ethanol is present, it is possible to raise the net energy value of ethanol from 1.08 to 3.78 if distillation at the manufacturing level ceases at 50% v/v purity. The goal of this study was to investigate the feasibility of a system described as such by build a functioning proof of concept. In doing so, waste exhaust heat from a small Honda generator set was successfully captured to drive an ethanol/water distillation column capable of producing ethanol at 90% v/v purity. Further development is pending on resolving scale-up issues and running the generator set on 90% v/v ethanol to fully close the loop and realize the full potential of the combined heat and power system.