Emerging Areas in Bioengineering

Chapter 14Separation of Butanol, Acetone, and Ethanol

Di Cai, Song Hu, Peiyong Qin and Tianwei Tan

Acetone–butanol–ethanol (ABE) fermentation is one of the oldest industrial fermentation styles, the second largest fermentation process in the early of twentieth century [1, 2]. Unfortunately, ABE fermentation suffered from the technical bottlenecks of severe product inhibition of butanol, leading to the low butanol concentration in the fermentation broth with low ABE productivity [3–5]. After 1950s, with the prosperous of petrochemical industry, bio-based butanol lost its competitiveness to the rising synthesis of butanol by petrochemical routes because of the increasing cost of raw materials and the relatively high cost of the purification ...