Method and systems for enhancing oil recovery from ethanol production byproducts
AssigneeGs Cleantech Corporation
InventorDavid J. Winsness
Life of this patent
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Abstract
Methods and related systems efficiently and effectively recover a significant amount of valuable, useable oil from byproducts formed during a dry milling process used for producing ethanol. The method may include forming a concentrate from the byproduct and recovering oil from the concentrate. The step of forming the concentrate may comprise evaporating the byproduct using a multi-stage evaporator, as well as recovering the oil before the final stage of the evaporator. Further, the step of recovering oil from the concentrate may comprise using a centrifuge and, in particular, a disk stack centrifuge. Other aspects include related methods and subsystems for recovering oil.
Claims12
A method for recovering oil in a dry milling process for producing ethanol from corn, the method comprising:
- separating a whole stillage byproduct of the dry milling process with a separator into a distillers wet grains fraction, a thin stillage fraction, and an oily fraction;
- combining the oily and thin stillage fractions;
- evaporating the combined fractions of the oily fraction and the thin stillage fraction to remove moisture and form a concentrate of the oily and thin stillage fractions;
- recovering oil from the concentrate with an additional separator;
- evaporating the concentrate to further reduce the moisture content of the concentrate and form an evaporated concentrate;
- and
- mixing the evaporated concentrate with the further reduced moisture content with the distillers wet grains fraction.
A method for recovering oil in a dry milling process for producing ethanol from corn, the method comprising:
- evaporating a thin stillage fraction to form a thin stillage concentrate with a reduced moisture content relative to the thin stillage fraction;
- recovering oil from the thin stillage concentrate with a horizontal centrifugal three phase decanter;
- evaporating the thin stillage concentrate to further reduce the moisture content of the thin stillage concentrate and form an evaporated thin stillage concentrate;
- and
- mixing the evaporated thin stillage concentrate with a distillers wet grains fraction.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.