Antifoam in ethanol fermentation broths

[CaptainPanic]

Antifoam is often used in ethanol fermentation to reduce foaming (duh).

 

I have learned from searching around that antifoam (in general) is an oil, or sometimes a silicon oil (not 100% sure about that).

 

Does anyone know:

1. What type of antifoam is used specifically in ethanol fermentation on industrial scale?

2. What organic oils (if they are organic at all) are used? I'd like to know (a) specific example(s).

 

And if possible, a price for the antifoam (price for industry - this is probably not possible to answer. Prices that industry pays for chemicals are notoriously hard to find.)

 

[edit] I cannot change the thread title. Antofoam... tsk.

Edited January 13, 2009 by CaptainPanic
trying to remove the typo from the thread name, but failing... :(

[fredrik]

Hello Captain,

 

The few things I'm aware of are some products used by beer breweries to prevent excessive foaming during fermentation. This is used by homebrewers and also some commercial breweries.

 

The product name is Fermcap manufactured by http://www.kerrygroup.com/

 

I never used it by I know many homebrewers that have. The delicate balance for a brewer is that you want moderation. You can to minimize foaming during fermentation as well as during wort boil, however you do not want that at the expense of final foam stability. Head retention and foam texture are key quality parameters for beer. This is the target for this antifoam agent. But I'm sure there are others.

 

About the price I don't have it in my head, but given thta homebrewers buy it, it's not that bad. Check out a good homebrewing supplier and they might have it.

 

The active agent is indeed a silicon oil at least in this specific antifoam is supposedly an emulsion of dimethyl polysiloxan(E900) in a food grade emulsifier.

 

For foam quality excessive foam blowoffs during fermentation can actually be detrimental to final foam quality since sometimes polyphenols and foam active proteins are enrichd in the foam, and these are drained from the bulk if large blowoff volumes are used.

 

Normal homebrewers othewise keep enough headspace to minimize blowoff. But the other downside of that is oxygen inclusion coming with the headspace, until ti's flushed.

 

/Fredrik

[CaptainPanic]

Thanks for the feedback! It's much appreciated.

I'm not looking for food-grade antifoam. (I'm thinking that anything food-grade is usually more expensive). It's for bio-ethanol for fuel purposes. I should have specified this in the 1st post perhaps

I'm not doing any home brewing... Also, what I am talking about will be a larger scale. The loss of tasty polyphenols is no problem, but I doubt that it takes place in the first place if you take simple molasses as a feedstock - there will be little polyphenols in that... (And it will probably taste horribly).

[fredrik]

Hello, I don't think it's expensive it depends what you mean with expensive, I just checked a US homebrew supplier.

 

7$ for 4oz, but the the recommended dosage is a few drops per gallon

http://www.northernbrewer.com/pics/fullsize/Fermcap-S.jpg

 

/Fredrik

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I'm sure you can cut that price way further if you buy it by gallon though

 

/Fredrik

[CaptainPanic]

Hehe... I'm probably thinking about buying it by the tonne (in my desk study - it's not yet going to be built)

 

Process I'm working on is for the order of 100 m3 ethanol per day (99.5% wt ethanol). There will not be some guy walking around with a jerrycan of antifoam (I hope, poor guy).

 

Anyway, thanks for the feedback, it's much appreciated. These small details can be quite annoying if you cannot find the right data.

Edited January 22, 2009 by CaptainPanic
writing that this is for a design (cost estimate) and that any construction will be much later

[fredrik]

Hehe... I'm probably thinking about buying it by the tonne (in my desk study - it's not yet going to be built)

 

Process I'm working on is for the order of 100 m3 ethanol per day (99.5% wt ethanol). There will not be some guy walking around with a jerrycan of antifoam (I hope, poor guy).

 

Anyway, thanks for the feedback, it's much appreciated. These small details can be quite annoying if you cannot find the right data.

 

Hehe... okt that's different. Mmm.. you'd probably need up to 10-20 gallons of fermcap a day if you distill from a final "bio-beer" of 10-20 % ethanol

 

Maybe you can contact kerrygroup for a quote by tonne

 

( Some of the largerst brewing companites in US produces if I am not wrong over 100 million barrels of beer per year (sum of all their brewhouses). I don't know if they use fermcap, but supposed they did, they would consume maybe around ~500 gallons of fermcap a day )

 

/Fredrik

[Purpleboy]

Alcohol defoamer http://www.zilibon.com/proList.html

is a kind of defoamer specially designed for fermentation process. It is divided into: oil defoamer, silicone defoamer, compound oil defoamer. Such as: (Weifang Jinshui source J defoamer, Hangzhou Linhua defoamer, Tieling Jinfeng defoamer, Changsha Branch defoamer, etc.) for all types of fermentation production process defoaming, such as erythromycin, lincomycin Various fermentation defoaming processes such as avermectin, gentamycin, penicillin, citric acid, lysine, and yeast are also widely used in veterinary drug processing and post-extraction processes.