How to Make Ethanol Using Different Ingredients and Different Processes

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Common ingredients used in the teachings on how to make ethanol are corn and grain sorghum, wheat, barley and potatoes and in Brazil, the world’s largest producer of ethanol, sugarcane is used when learning how to make ethanol. There are also two processes by which one can learn how to make ethanol and these are dry mill process and wet mill process and in the US, dry mill process is most often used when teaching others how to make ethanol with the starch content of the corn being fermented into sugar to be further distilled into alcohol.

Dry Mill and Wet Mill Processes

When wanting to know more about how to make ethanol one would obviously need to learn the steps involved in both dry and wet mill processes and for the dry mill process, one needs to do the milling, followed by liquefaction, fermentation, distillation and finally dehydration and denaturing. The wet mill process requires steeping the corn, screening, separation, starch conversion, germ separation, fiber, wet gluten, drying, fermentation, syrup refining and oil refining of the germ.

In the dry mill process, milling involves passing the feedstock through a hammer mill that grinds it into a powder called meal which is mixed with water as well as alpha-amylase and passed through cookers to liquefy the starch. This mash that comes out of the cookers is cooled and glucoamylase is added so that the liquefied starch can be transformed into sugar that in turn will be fermented.

Yeast Must Be Added For Fermentation to Occur

For the fermentation process to take effect yeast must be added to the mash and this will allow the sugar to be fermented into ethanol as well as carbon dioxide. The next step is the distillation process which is necessary to remove the alcohol from the solids and the water and usually the alcohol is at 96% strength at this stage. This alcohol is passed through a dehydration system and all the water is removed and for this one may use a molecular sieve to capture every last drop of water remaining and once performed leaves the alcohol at 200 proof.

Finally, ethanol which will be used for fuel has to be denatured which means it should be rendered unfit for human consumption and so a small quantity of two to five percent of gasoline is added to it and this may have to be done at an ethanol plant. These are the steps one needs to know about when concerned with how to make ethanol using the dry mill process.