MASS TRANSFER IN FERMENTATION PROCESSES

Abstract

The peculiarities of anaerobic fermentation processes with the accumulation of dissolved ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide in the culture media are considered in the article.The solubility of CO2 is limited by the state of saturation in accordance with Henry’s law. This, with all else being equal, limits the mass transfer on the interface surface of yeast cells and the liquid phase of the medium. A phenomenological model of the media restoration technologies based on the unsaturation index on СО2 is developed. It is shown that this restoration in the existing technologies of fermentation of sugar-rich media occurs, to a limited extent, in self-organized flow circuits, with variable values of temperatures and hydrostatic pressures, due to the creation of unsaturated local zones.It is shown that increasing the height of the media in isovolumetric apparatuses leads to an increase in the levels of flow circuits organization and to the improvement of the desaturation and saturation modes of the liquid phase and intensification of mass transfer processes. Among the deterministic principles of restoring the saturation possibilities of the media, there are forced variables of pressures with time pauses on their lower and upper levels. In such cases, the possibilities of short-term intensive desaturations in full media volumes, the restoration of their saturation perception of CO2, and the activation of fermentation processes are achieved. This direction is technically feasible for active industrial equipment.The cumulative effect of the action of variable pressures and temperatures corresponds to the superposition principle, but at the final stages of fermentation, the pressure and temperature values are leveled, so the restoration of the unsaturation state slows down to the level of the bacteriostatic effect. The possibility of eliminating the disadvantages of the final stage of fermentation by means of programmable variable pressures is shown