Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study

A long time ago until now, non-renewable fuels usage has a larger demand every year. In

recently, the world experiences a crisis of diminishing fossil fuel reserves throughout the world.

These include petroleum, gasolines, fossil fuel and other natural resources.

According to Gunasekaran and Raj (1999) natural resources such as petroleum have been

consumed at high rate over last decades. The heavy reliance on this fuel is bound to end, due to

environmental impact and to the fact that they might eventually run out.

Ethanol has been recognized as an important renewable and sustainable fuel source for

modern industries [Ward & Singh, 2002; Balat, 2007]. Ethanol is traditionally produced from

feedstock high in sugar and/or starch content. Most used feedstocks for fuel ethanol are wheat,

corn, sugar cane and sugar beet. The sugars can be fermented to ethanol, while starch first has to

be hydrolyzed to obtain free sugars.

The final step in producing ethanol is the recovery and purification steps. These methods

are the significant for an effective process tool in recovery of liquid mixtures and dehydration of

liquid hydrocarbons to yield high-purity organics most notably ethanol (Egloso, 2014).

Several processes were used before then to recover and purify ethanol into pure-grade.

These include hybrid distillation and pervaporation, perstraction, liquid-liquid