Reverse Osmosis for Bio-ethanol production

[zamu2010]

Dear all,
I am looking in to a feasibility if it is possible to recover Bio-ethanol from liquid stream by Reverse Osmosis (or pressure swing adsorption). The stream has very little soilds as the solid fration of the biomass is removed in earlier stage.
Any references or recomendation??
Thanks in advance for your comments....

 

[cloa]

You might want to define your liquid stream.

 

[zamu2010]

The stream is ethanol water solution with ethanol conc. between 2-3% and 0.13% solids. The idea is to recover the ethanol and further purify this with pressure swing adsorption to the fuel grade ethanol.
I hope it calrify the issue.

 

[dcasto]

bottle it and sell it as a drink. The profits will buy more fuel than you could recover.

 

[Jobst]

Some beer brewing companies use reverse osmosis to make low alcohol beer (water and ethanol pass through membrane, with a higher concentration of ethanol in the permate than in the original beer) but this is very energy intensive and the concentration factor is very low.