Adsorption of Butanol from Acetone-Butanol-Ethanol Solution by Porous Poly (ether block amide) Adsorbent

A long-standing problem that has held back commercial bio-butanol was the toxicity of bio-butanol to the culture in the fermentation process. In this study, porous adsorbents were prepared by the wet-phase inversion technique from 7wt % of PEBAX^® 2533 in butanol. The non-solvent used to induce the phase inversion was methanol. Analysis of the surface characteristics of the flat-sheet adsorbent by SEM technique revealed that the adsorbent was homogenously porous. The adsorbent was used to
adsorb butanol from the aqueous solution containing 1.0, 19.2, and 1.7 g/L of acetone,
butanol, and ethanol respectively. The batch adsorption was carried out at 37^oC. The
adsorption studies showed that the adsorption capacity for acetone, ethanol, and
butanol were 2.60, 2.48, and 67.46 mg/g of sorbent, respectively. It was also found that
the butanol adsorption was consistent with the Freundlich isotherm and Pseudosecond
order.