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Contribution Process for Producing Biofuel from Ripe Plantain Utilizing a HZSM-5 Catalyst

Abstract:

This project describes the processes that were implemented during the experimental tests to obtain ethanol from the ripe plantain fruit, going through the treatment, fermentation and distillation stages. Afterwards, the alcoholic grades of the different obtained ethanol samples were measured, to select the samples with the greater alcoholic grade and inject them to the HZSM-5 packed bed reactor, to determine the amount of ethanol that oligomerizes to obtain fuel. Through the experimental analysis, appropriate conditions in the distillation temperature and fermentation time were established for the process of obtaining bioethanol, as well as the temperature of the reactor and the spatial velocity (WVHS) in the biotransformation process of ethanol to high octane gasoline, using a catalytic bed heterogeneous reactor. Grades of 50 resulted in the process of obtaining the bioethanol, and a selective performance of 23.5% of the biofuel was yielded. The gasoline was characterized by means of INEN (935:2016) standardized analyses for commercial gasoline, with which an octane number of 96.5 was determined, thus obtaining a gasoline of greater octane rating than the standard (super) gasoline commercialized in Ecuador.