Production of bioethanol from bitter cassava: mass balance study

Abstract

The aim of this research was to examine the mass balance in bioethanol production from bitter cassava by experimental work and simulating using superpro and then compare the mass balance finding between this two procedure., For the pretreatment to convert starch into glucose, three processes must be done which were gelatinization, liquefaction and saccharification processes. Gelatinization was done at high temperature to swell the starch granule. After that, the enzymatic hydrolysis using α-amylase was used for liquefaction process and followed by enzyme amyloglucosidase for saccharification process. Next, the glucose produced was fermented by using saccharomyces cerevisiae to convert it into bioethanol. Apart of experiment, by simulating mass balance through superpro software, all the parameter and value involve in experiment would be applied in order to compare the result. Even mass balance by process simulation might not be able to replace the experiments, but it constitutes a useful tool in the planning and evaluation of experiments such as highlight the factor that was sometimes neglected in experimental studies. By experimental, 3 kg of raw bitter cassava would produce approximately 450 g starch flour and 8.29 mg/L bioethanol while the result getting from the simulation was 11624.36 mg/L. The percentage error from the experimental and simulation process was 99.93 %. From the percentage error, the improvement in experimental can be done to reduce the percentage error.