An empirical model on extractive lactic acid bioconversion.

Abstract

The commercial production of lactic acid through fermentation process has always been in competition with its chemical synthesis process (Kirk Othmer, 1995). Lactic acid produced through the fermentation process has to cope with the problems of purification to meet the required quality standards. An attempt to improve the fermentative production is possible by proper design of an industrial process involving low capital cost for the plant. Also, the low energy costs both in its fermentation and purification, are required. In the commercial interest, the investment cost should be minimised, which is possible only when the cell density in fermenter is high. It means that the inhibitory effect of the product on process kinetics must be minimised. Based on these requirements, the extractive bioconversion technique is one of the approaches to achieve the commercially viable lactic acid production. Extractive lactic acid bioconversion using ion-exchange resin process has already been described in our earlier publications (Srivastava e al., 1992: Roychoudhury et al., 1995) It is always an advantage to develop a process model, thus opening an area of biotechnological improvements to the process. In the present paper, an empirical mathematical model has been described to explain this extractive bioconversion using ion-exchange resin process. It was based on generalised Monod's growth model and Leudeking and Piret equation. The system was defined with the assumption that the microbial growth can be represented as a single reaction; only a very little part of the substrate is utilised for the maintenance of the cells. The effect of end product inhibition on growth and product formation kinetics has also been considered in this model. A non-linear regression technique was used for evaluation of bioconversion kinetic parameters. The fourth order Runge Kutta method was used for solving the differential equations. The results of this process simulation are also discussed in the present paper. It indicates that the use of present technique has minimised the effect of lactic acid inhibition on process kinetics and hence higher productivity and least substrate utilisation for maintenance of cells. A statistical F-test has been performed for determining the validity of the model for a given set of experimental data with a level of significance alpha = 0.05 selected for this extractive batch recycle bioconversion process using ion-exchange resin.