RESEARCH ARTICLE Property Modeling, Energy Balance and Process Simulation Applied to Bioethanol Purification Ma ´gda C. Santos 1,2 • Allan A. Albuquerque 2 • Simoni M. P. Meneghetti 1 • Joa ˜o I. Soletti 2 Received: 14 February 2020 / Accepted: 5 May 2020 Ó Society for Sugar Research & Promotion 2020 Abstract The use of renewable sources has been an alternative to decrease the negative environmental impacts of fossil fuels. In this context, bioethanol from sugarcane has proved to be a successful option to gasoline. However, bioethanol purification through conventional distillation requires high-energy demand. For this reason, energy bal- ance calculations are very useful to estimate steam demand. As a result, simpler alternatives for estimation of steam consumption from spreadsheet calculations have been encouraged. In contrast, many efforts have focused to solve complex flowsheets including tear streams, which increases convergence complexity for each change on feed composition and additional components. In this work, mathematical models were fitted to bioethanol–water mixture property data and applied to energy balance cal- culations involved in the conventional process for hydrated bioethanol purification. Total steam consumption was obtained for volume percentages of bioethanol in the wine feed stream of 6, 8 and 10 °GL considering potential losses found in the industrial reality. The calculated data were compared to simulations carried out in the Aspen Plus Ò software. Similar values of total steam consumption were found comparing the two approaches, where the average absolute relative deviation was kept below 5%. Moreover, simulated temperature and composition profiles agreed to process data. Finally, mathematical models and energy balance calculations proved to be a simpler and faster alternative to estimate total steam consumption involved in the hydrated bioethanol purification from wine. Keywords Bioethanol Á Distillation Á Energy balance Á Property modeling Á Simulation Á Steam consumption List of Symbols a Constant defined by the experimental data to obtain c (kcal kg -1 °C -1 ) b Constant defined by the experimental data to obtain c (kcal kg -1 ) ARD Average relative deviation (%) C Steam consumption per liter of bioethanol purified for the column (kg L -1 ) c Specific heat of the material (kcal kg -1 °C -1 ) C S Total steam consumption per liter of bioethanol purified for both columns (kg L -1 ) F P l Factor of volume percentage of liquid phlegm relative to total phlegm volume F Et2 Factor of volume percentage of second-grade bioethanol relative to total phlegm volume H Specific enthalpy from the material stream (kcal kg -1 ) k C Factor to take in account existing losses for an isolated column k Et Bioethanol loss k T Factor to take in account the steam loss in tubes L Latent heat (kcal kg -1 ) M Total utility mass injected in the column (kg) m Mass from the material stream (kg) Q Amount of energy from the material stream related to sensible heat (kcal) & Allan A. Albuquerque aaalbuq10@gmail.com 1 Group of Catalysis and Chemical Reactivity (GCAR), Institute of Chemistry and Biotechnology, Federal University of Alagoas, Maceio ´, Alagoas 57072-970, Brazil 2 Laboratory of Separation Systems and Process Optimization (LASSOP), Technology Center, Federal University of Alagoas, Maceio ´, Alagoas 57072-970, Brazil 123 Sugar Tech https://doi.org/10.1007/s12355-020-00841-y