BACKGROUND: In this work, the selective extraction of ethanol by pervaporation through a POMS (polyoctylmethyl siloxane) hydrophobic membrane supplied by GKKS (Germany) was investigated. First, binary ethanol aqueous solutions were studied considering the effect of ethanol feed concentration (0-11 wt%) and operating temperature (307.55-326.35 K). The effect of some by-products of the ethanol fermentation, such as glycerol, succinic acid, butanol and acetone, on the pervaporation performance has been analyzed. RESULTS: For binary ethanol aqueous solutions, it was found that water permeation flux remained more or less constant while ethanol permeation flux increased continuously when increasing ethanol feed concentration. However, water and ethanol permeances did not change much in the concentration and temperature range studied. It was observed that the addition of glycerol and succinic acid sharply decreased the total permeation flux while ethanol concentration in the permeate was hardly affected. The addition of butanol and acetone resulted in a lower separation factor for ethanol through the POMS membrane. CONCLUSIONS: For ethanol aqueous solutions the POMS membrane was found to be selective towards ethanol, although it does not present higher separation factors than distillation in the concentration range covered in this work. The presence of other components of the fermentation broth has a great influence in the pervaporation behavior. Further work must be done on the study of multicomponent and real mixtures. (C) 2009 Society of Chemical Industry