Attainable Region for Biobutanol Production

Abstract

Abstract The attainable region concept employs a computational/geometrical procedure for deter-mining the boundaries of the region that include all possible products for a given feed condition and reactor network configuration (Milne et al., 2004). We used literature mod-els for reaction kinetics of acetone-butanol-ethanol fermentation (Shinto et al., 2007) to-gether with idealized reactor models of continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) and plug flow reactor (PFR), and assuming linear mixing. In this work, we analyzed the reactor network for biobutanol production, applying for the first time the concept of the Attainable Region (AR) to this system. We used an algorithmic procedure for constructing AR candidates (Seodigeng et al., 2009). We chose residence time and butanol concentration as the state variables. According to the kinetic models we used in this study, the best network structure is CSTR followed by a PFR. The methodology we proposed can be readily modified to evaluate other kinetic models of different substrates and microorganism.