Data-driven modelling of bioethanol fuel production from rambutan fruit waste

Due to lack of confidence on potential yield and subsequent net benefit, wide-scale implementations of bioethanol from food/fruit waste are not accelerating. With the aim of enhancing stakeholders’ confidence, this paper presents a simple mathematical model formulation, which can estimate potential bioethanol generation capacity from rambutan waste under different input conditions. Mathematical formulation was derived based on three contributing factors such as pH, temperature and fermentation period. The factors were derived based on an earlier experimental study on production of bioethanol from rambutan waste. Results from the derived mathematical model were compared with the experimental measurements from earlier study. It is found that the proposed model is capable to accurately estimate potential bioethanol productions from rambutan waste. Model calculated results are having a coefficient of correlation of 0.98 with the measured data. Standard errors of the model's estimations are also quite low, having RMSE = 0.17, MAE = 0.14 and RAE = 0.02. For a wider industrial generation, a mathematical framework is proposed to calculate benefit-cost ratio of production costs against yield value considering the time value of the money. Such mathematical framework will assist decision makers on deciding optimum input parameters through optimised energy consumption.