At the start our project it was going to be with molasses but we changed it to HONEY after this post was made... SOme additional information we have come up with, any thoughts?
Yes, there is an explanation,
What effect does water have on the fermentation process?
And why does this happen?
What will happen if we put very little in, or what would happen if we put heaps in.
We are looking at fermenting honey with different amounts of water and then distilling it into ethanol? what effect will this have?
Yield of ethanol is mostly about survivability of the yeast. Yeast can't survive too high concentrations of sugars (osmotic pressure) and too high concentrations of ethanol (denaturation of proteins). You want them to process as much sugar as possible in as small volume (less processing) as possible.
So there is an optimum amount to produce the most amount of ethanol as what you would expect. The less water, the more concentrated the honey is, because it is so concentrated it is killing the yeast. Honey keeps, it doesn’t go off. It doesn’t go off because it is so concentrated in sugar that the osmatic pressure in the bacteria cell wall sucks all the water out so it is becomes with lower levels of water, it is more concentrated than the bactiral cell wall so it is much more concentrated than the yeast. So the water inside the yeast just comes out inside the honey drying the yeast out and killing it.
Alcohol denatures proteins by disrupting the side chain intramolecular hydrogen bonding. New hydrogen bonds are formed instead between the new alcohol molecule and the protein side chains.
Proteins depend heavily on "hydrophobic" interactions
Water molecules like to form strong hydrogen bonds with each other, if there's a large surface area of protein in the solution, these interactions are disrupted. In order to minimise exposed surface area, the bits of the protein which aren't able to interact with each other tend to fold over themselves to minimise exposed surface area. In like a ball or coil.
The more pure the ethanol is, the tendency for non-interacting regions to stick together is much weaker so proteins tend to unfold.
The more water that is added, the more pure the ethanol is because it denatures protein too quickly and forms a thin outer layer of denaturated protein beyond which the cell lives on.
Too much alcohol = dead yeast.
Hydrogen bonds cause the tertiary structure (ethanol) to stuff up. Only one hydrogen bond needs to stuff up and the whole process is over and the yeast dies.
Figured out what in the Honey gets fermented into ethanol.
Understand the formula of what in the Honey gets fermented into ethanol.
Estimated the theoretical maximum ethanol from what is in the Honey that I have measured out.
All the sugars in honey get fermented into ethanol,
38% of honey is Fructose, 31% of honey is Glucose, 17% is water, and the rest is other sugars.
Since fructose and glucose have the same molecular formulas the approximate equation for
honey->ethanol is
C6H12O6 --> H3CH2OH + 2CO2
Using that formula,
It was estimated that we should get 41g of ethanol out of how much honey we put in.
This was used to work out the percentage yield and turns out our method wasn't very efficient as the most ethanol that was made was about 5g, so how highest percentage yield was about 10%.
