BIOFUEL PRECURSOR FROM POTATO WASTE

Adhip Ghosal, Soumitra Banerjee, Sayan Chaterjee

Abstract: Depleting fossil fuels and alarming rise in levels of green house gases in the atmosphere has forced for the search of alternative renewable sources of energy. With agricultural activities spreading across the globe, biomass residue generated can indeed form a useful energy source. And also the ‘wastes’ from specific kinds of agricultural industries have great potential to be converted into fuels. Biofuels especially ethanol produced from biomass has already received world wide attention and along with solving energy problems it is also proved to be environmental friendly. Since ours is an agricultural country where agricultural wastes are dumped in large volumes, ethanol derived from biomass may serve as a viable option. And stream pollution by waste effluents from food processing plants has also become one of the major importances in today’s world. The potato starch processing industry contributes considerably to this problem. The objective of this work is utilization of the waste i.e starch which is an effluent of various processes of a ,potato starch processing industry, by converting the starch into ethanol which can be used as an energy source for that particular industry itself. While sugar based raw materials like cane juice or molasses can be directly fermented, a two step process needs to be followed for the production of alcohol from starch based raw materials. The starch is liquefied using alpha-amylase and then saccharified using amyloglucosidase. The fuel ethanol is recovered by distillation after anaerobic fermentation using yeast primarily species of Saccharomyces cerevisia. The process described would reduce the amount of waste and ethanol used as energy source would cover the cost of the process. Further improvement in the process is being developed by changing the reaction environment to increase the rate constant of the reactor system.

Keywords: ML, multimedia, Multi-dimension, Database, Retrieval Model, multidimensional array, unstructured data

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2013.0203001