Introduction:

The Ecuadorian industry consumes large amounts of citric acid. This product is used as a preservative and natural antioxidant. Among the raw materials that can be used is bagasse. There is availability of this residue in Pastaza province that is obtained from the panela handmade manufacture is not used.

Objective:

Design a technological process for obtaining citric acid from sugar cane bagasse available in Pastaza province.

Materials and Methods:

A procedure was used for process design and SuperPro Designer software tool to simulate four quantities of bagasse consumption for the selected technological process that includes conditioning, pretreatment, solid fermentation, separation and purification.

Results and Discussion:

Considering the possible plant capacities with respect to the raw material consumption, it was obtained that if 68.35 t/day are consumed, the Net Present Value is positive. Therefore, from that capacity profits can be generated. The wastes generated in citric acid production are gypsum, biomass, lignin, hydrolases and CO2 emissions. These are intended for new products or energy production in order to reduce the environmental impact.

Conclusions:

The economic analysis for capacities of 60, 72, 84 and 96 tons of bagasse carried out for citric acid technological process designed in Pastaza province, resulting in a NPV of -3 021 000, 1 217 000, 5 827 000 and 10 576 000 USD respectively, which allowed to find an equation that predicted NPV behavior.

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