What bacteria is used in the fermentation process to produce acetone?

Question

I've used acetone straight in my pickup truck and lawnmower. it is a drop-in gasoline replacement. Would like to brew up my own instead of purchasing.

Answer 1

I'm really hoping that you are a little confused here. It would DEFINITELY be a bad idea to use acetone in your engines. I think you mean to say "alcohol" not acetone. BIG difference.

Acetone is a powerful solvent of rubber and plastics which would cause serious harm to all tubing and gasketing in your engines, probably cause the fuel lines or connections to leak and result in a fire or explosion that could destroy you car, your garage, your house or your life. Acetone is mostly not "brewed up" - instead it is mostly produced in a chemical engineering process by heating isopropyl alcohol with high temperature steam.

If you really meant to say "alcohol" then it is theoretically possible to replace gasoline with alcohol in an engine, provided the engineers who designed the engine had that in mind and anticipated a few minor problems (including more rubber degradation issues). However, it is not cost effective to produce alcohol in a home based system. You can, if you are set up for it, make about 2 to 3 gallons of alcohol from a bushel of corn. That is definitely brewing - it is exactly the same process as running a home still for making drinking alcohol - in fact, the alcohol that is used for cars is identical to drinking alcohol -- it is basically 190 proof vodka. Sometimes fuel alcohol is "denatured" - that is, they put poison in it to prevent people from drinking it.

How big a still do you think you would need to produce 2 or 3 tankfuls of alcohol a week for your family cars? Do you really want to store that much highly flammable liquid in your house?

You need to read up on this quite a lot before you try any home production - it is dangerous and almost certainly not worth the effort unless you can get large amounts of corn for free.

ps there have been a lot of urban legends about how adding a small amount of acetone to the gasoline gives a mileage boost - extensive testing shows that this is a myth, It doesnt do anything at all for mileage.

Answer 2

Acetone is usually derived from crude oil.

Pull out the cumene.

Convert that to cumene hydroperoxide.

From there you can synthesize acetone and phenol.

As for using acetone as a gasoline replacement, I've never heard of it being done. Not successfully anyway.

Answer 3

Anaerobic respiration is basically cell respiration, but without the oxygen and without the citric acid cycle. So in the cellular respiration reaction, your reactants are glucose(a simple sugar) and oxygen. And your products are water and carbon dioxide. You take away the oxygen, and basically, glucose breaks down to lactic acid and a couple of ATP molecules. This is the type of fermentation that happens in human cells. Thus, fermentation is a type of anaerobic respiration. Though, in some plant cells and yeast cells, fermentation leads to the production of an alcohol(called ethanol) and carbon dioxide.