Project number
15083
Organization
UA Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering
Academic year
2015-2016
The goal of this project is to design a process to produce 90-proof corn whiskey using solar energy. The project is located in Yuma, Arizona, which experiences the nation’s highest direct normal irradiance. Solar energy is gathered using a series of rotating parabolic mirrors that reflect light onto a tube located at the foci. The tube is transparent, vacuum-sealed, and contains a heat-transfer fluid designed to absorb solar energy, which is transferred to a series of two distillation columns. After dilution of the purified ethanol, the final product is 90-proof corn whiskey.