Improvement of solar ethanol distillation using ultrasonic waves

This report presents a study on the use of ultrasonic waves in solar ethanol distillation to investigate the performance of ultrasonic waves at a frequency of 30 kHz and at 100 Watts that were installed in the inlet area of a 10-litre distillation tank. Based on the non-continuous distillation process (batch distillation), the experiment demonstrated that using ultrasonic waves in solar ethanol distillation caused the average concentration of hourly distilled ethanol to be higher than that of a normal system (solar ethanol distillation without ultrasonic wave) at the same or higher distillation rate and hourly distillation volume. The ultrasonic wave was able to enhance the separation of ethanol from the solution (water-ethanol mixture) through solar distillation. The amount of pure ethanol product from each distilled batch was clearly larger than the amount of product obtained from a normal system when the initial concentration of ethanol was lower than 50%v/v (% by volume), where an average of approximately 40% and 20% are obtained for an initial ethanol concentration of 10%v/v and 30%v/v, respectively. Furthermore, the distillation rate varied based on the solar radiation value.