A novel close-circulating vapor stripping-vapor permeation technique for boosting biobutanol production and recovery

BACKGROUND: Butanol derived from renewable resources by microbial fermentation is considered as one of not only valuable platform chemicals but alternative advanced biofuels. However, due to low butanol concentration in fermentation broth, butanol production is restricted by high energy consumption for product recovery. For in situ butanol recovery techniques, such as gas stripping and pervaporation, the common problem is their low efficiency in harvesting and concentrating butanol. Therefore, there is a necessity to develop an advanced butanol recovery technique for cost-effective biobutanol production. RESULTS: A close-circulating vapor stripping-vapor permeation (VSVP) process was developed with temperature-difference control for single-stage butanol recovery. In the best scenario, the highest butanol separation factor of 142.7 reported to date could be achieved with commonly used polydimethylsiloxane membrane, when temperatures of feed solution and membrane surroundings were 70 and 0 °C, respectively. Additionally, more ABE (31.2 vs. 17.7 g/L) were produced in the integrated VSVP process, with a higher butanol yield (0.21 vs. 0.17 g/g) due to the mitigation of butanol inhibition. The integrated VSVP process generated a highly concentrated permeate containing 212.7 g/L butanol (339.3 g/L ABE), with the reduced energy consumption of 19.6 kJ/g-butanol. CONCLUSIONS: Therefore, the present study demonstrated a well-designed energy-efficient technique named by vapor stripping-vapor permeation for single-stage butanol removal. The butanol separation factor was multiplied by the temperature-difference control strategy which could double butanol recovery performance. This advanced VSVP process can completely eliminate membrane fouling risk for fermentative butanol separation, which is superior to other techniques. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s13068-018-1129-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.