Ethanol production in a biofilm reactor with non-sterile carob extract media and its modeling

ABSTRACT

Modeling is gain importance to knowledge about kinetic-metabolic nature of fermentations. In this study, Modified Richards Model (MRM) was applied to model ethanol fermentation in a biofilm reactor with non-sterile carob extract (NSCE). Results indicated that MRM showed its generality to fit cell growth, ethanol production, and sugar consumption curves in non-sterile enriched (NSE) and non-sterile non-enriched (NSNE) media. For NSE medium, MRM successfully predicted the biomass and ethanol production and sugar consumption. Nonetheless, MRM victoriously forecasted all sigmoid curves related to fermentation of NSNE medium. Consequently, MRM predictions satisfactorily fitted the experimental data based on the model evaluation results.

KEYWORDS:

• Biofilm reactor
• ethanol
• modeling
• modified Richards model
• non-sterile carob extract

Abbreviations

Table

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Akdeniz University Research Foundation [Grant number 2014.02.0121.020].