Abstract:
Alcohol distillery processes are agro based industries that produces different types of
alcohol liquors to serve communities as a drink, raw material for other industries and
power alcohol. Alcohol liquors are produced in molasses fermentation stage. Before
fermentation processes the required quantity of yeast propagations are taking place for
fermentation processes. The cane sugar molasses fermentation by yeasts is a dilution
process operated by three step procedures (media preparation for two processes, yeast
propagation and molasses fermentation processes). The propagation and fermentation
optimization processes using molasses were done to get the required quantity of
viable yeast cells and maximum alcohol production efficiency and research developed
a method to obtain better results. To do this, media was prepared first from molasses,
process water and nutrients with optimized conditions. The raw materials (cane
molasses and process water) characterizations were analyzed to formulate optimum
process parameters. For both yeast propagation and fermentation process parameters,
laboratory analysis and Design expert 7.0 software was used for proper optimization
purposes. Three influential process variables initial media brix, initial media pH and
cell sizes have been chosen to conduct the experiment. Viable yeast cell count of
735x106 cells per milliliter sample was obtained at the optimum condition of initial
media brix of 11.75, initial media pH of 4.4 and inoculums size of 26.665 % which is
very high when compared with the current factory result below 240x106 cell/ml
samples. Alcohol content of 10.42alcohol % was obtained at the optimum condition
of initial brix of 17, initial pH of 4.3 and inoculums size of 20% which is very high
when compared with the current factory result below 7 % of alcohol (v/v).The
validity, verification and effect of different levels of each parameter (initial media
brix, initial media pH and cell size inoculums) on each processes responses are also
studied. Finally, the yeast strain available in Metahara sugar factory ethanol plant
microbial laboratory was found favorable yeasts and has to be kept properly with
proper optimization to get the maximum alcohol production processes.