Effluent treatment for alcohol distillery: Catalytic thermal pretreatment (catalytic thermolysis) with energy recovery

Distillery spent wash: Treatment technologies and potential applications

“…Studies were carried out to find out the efficacy of the ultrasonic irradiation as a pretreatment step and the results indicated that ultrasound treatment enhanced the biodegradability of the distillery waste water [126]. Chaudhari et al [127] proposed a novel catalytic thermal pretreatment or catalytic thermolysis (CT) to recover the majority of its energy content with consequent COD and BOD removal. They found that the initial pH (pH 0 ) had profound impact on the efficiency of thermolysis in COD removal.…”

Controllability of runoff and soil loss from small plots treated by vinasse-produced biochar

“…Apart from high organic content rates, distillery wastewater including vinasse also contains nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, which are toxic or could be contaminants under certain conditions. The wastewater is characterized by very high chemical oxygen demand and biochemical oxygen demand, whereas pH, which depends on the conditions of sugar cane cultivation, may range between 3.7 and 5.0 (Chaudhari et al, 2008;Sataywali and Balakrishnan, 2008). At the start of the bioethanol program large quantities of this vinasse were simply poured into the rivers with catastrophic environmental consequences in many localities owing to eutrophication which caused widespread death of fish and concomitant other aerobic life forms.…”

Catalytic thermal treatment (catalytic thermolysis) of a rice grain-based biodigester effluent of an alcohol distillery plant

“…In this paper the initial concentration of COD was kept constant at 35,000 mg/dm 3 , and after 12 h of the CT process the removal per cent of COD was measured. [10] Previous work done by several investigators is presented in Table 2. [3,9,[11][12][13][14] The objective of the present work is to explore the efficiency of the CT process in the reduction of COD and colour of rice grain-based distillery BDE.…”

“…These reductions also exemplify the reduction in COD (80.4% reduction from COD = 11,500) and the colour (83% reduction from 398 PCU) of the BDE. The thermolysis process of the BDE can, thus, be represented without catalyst as [8][9][10] Complex organic matter +H 2 O +heat > Solid residue + lower molecular weight organics.…”