An engineering and economic evaluation of wet and dry pre-fractionation processes for dry-grind ethanol facilities

An engineering-economic model was developed to compare the profitability of the wet fractionation process, a generic dry fractionation process, and the conventional dry grind process. Under market conditions as of January 2011, only fractionation processes generated a positive cash flow. Reduced unit manufacturing costs and increased ethanol production capacity were two major contributions. Corn and ethanol price sensitivity analysis showed that the wet fractionation process always outperformed a generic dry fractionation process at any scenario considered in this research. A generic dry fractionation process would provide better economic performance than the conventional dry grind process if corn price was low and ethanol price was high. All three processes would perform more resiliently if the DDGS price was determined by its composition.