Recovery of acetoin, a chemical pre-curser and produced via fermentation of sugar beet extract, using solvents.

Acetoin (3-hydroxybutanone) is a four-carbon ketone-alcohol used in the food industry and is also a precursor to important industrial chemicals such as butanediols and butanols.  In this work, we produced acetoin from sugars in sugar beet extract via fermentation using the bacterium Bacillus subtilis.  The product was recovered from the fermentation broth with acetone, another product that can be produced via fermentation of beet extract.  The results show that extraction was feasible and a process was designed and a cost analysis was performed using SuperPro Designer.