Recuperació de butirat i acetat produïts a partir de CO2

Abstract

The increase in global energy consumption in recent years and the resulting axhaustion of fossil resources such as oil are encouraging the development of new biofuels with a lower carbon footprint as alternative sources of renewable energy. Recently, research has prioritized the production of biofuels from carbon dioxide (CO2). This may be if high interest because it solves the problem of increasing prices in basic foods and also helps to mitigate the greenhouse effect. However, the methods proposed to date require large infrastructure, and are expensive and energy inefficient. Thus, a team of researchers from the Laboratory of Chemical and Environmental Engineering (LEQUIA) of the University of Girona have first described an innovative method for optimizing the production of butyrate via microbial electrosynthesis based on CO2 as the only carbon source. This involves using electric currents to stimulate carbohidrotrofic microorganisms to fix CO2 into organic compounds of high value to low pH values. During this process, intermediate products are obtained such as butyric wich has numerous applications and therefore interesting to extract and recover. To date, we have developed several technologies for the separation and recovery of organic acids have been developed, which will minimize the amount of sample and reagent consumption as well as the use of expensive and toxic solvents. This paper presents two techniques for the extraction and recovery of acetate and butyrate: liquidliquid extraction with organic solvents and extraction by hollow fiber membranes. The latter is considered to be a reliable technique that can provide high performance and requires simple and inexpensive equipment. The aim of this work is the extraction and recovery of acetic and butyric acids through liquid-liquid and hollow fiber experiments; and the evaluation and optimization of various parameters in order to obtain these two main compounds using liquid supported membranes