Thermodynamic optimization improves fuel ethanol purity and reduces costs in bioethanol production, indicating energy-efficient methods.
To address the high energy consumption of conventional three‐column distillation for fuel ethanol purification, this study proposes an energy‐saving heat pump distillation–membrane coupling process with three core innovations: integrating pressure‐swing column thermal coupling, heat pump‐driven steam grade enhancement, and ZIF‐8‐PDMS/PVDF mixed matrix membranes (MMMs) for deep dehydration; developing a membrane micro‐element model to make up for the lack of dedicated mass‐energy coupling membrane modules in commercial simulators; optimizing key parameters via Aspen Plus. Under the optimal conditions (crude/first/seconds columns with 11/8/24 theoretical plates, reflux ratios of 1.63/0.61/0.80, MMM area of 1336.67 m 2 ), the fuel ethanol purity reaches 99.46%. Compared with the conventional three‐column distillation process, the total annual cost (TAC) decreases by 9.78% to 5.475 × 10 6 USD · a −1 , CO 2 cost reduces by 20.92%, and the column top‐bottom temperature difference is 27.7°C (close to the 35°C economic threshold). This work promotes the application of ZIF‐8‐PDMS/PVDF MMMs in bioethanol dehydration and provides an industrial low‐energy green solution.
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Feng et al. (2026) studied this question.
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