Butyric acid production from mixed-culture anaerobic fermentation of brown algae

Abstract

Volatile fatty acids (VFA) is one of potential feedstock that has wide demand as intermediate product worldwide. Acetic acid (HAc)/C2, propionic acid (HPr)/C3 and butyric acid (HBu)/C4 normally is a main VFA produced in an anaerobic fermentation (AF). However, AF which is likely referring to pure-culture for the microbial source, will require high-cost production for a massive scale production. The utilization of mixed-culture as the microbial source, therefore, is promising to be developed and has been proven giving several benefits from bioprocessing organic feedstock source to techno-economic feasibility contribution. Bioprocess engineering is a main key to control the route, specifically on microbial community activity control. Current research work will carry out the potentiality of bioprocess engineering on optimising the microbial activity in a mixed-culture fermentation to enhance the C2-C4 production using sustained and potential feedstock, brown algae (BA).
Current research work has been succeeded to explore potential strategy for C4 production from BA as the results of microbial community activity. The integration of stage 1 for BA fermentation and stage 2 for chain elongation (CE) with the optimised processing condition that has been studied, able to lead the VFA accumulation dominated by C2 and C4 with average concentration 25.4 g. L-1 and 11.3 g.L-1, respectively. This research work promotes the bioresources recovery concept to overcome the wild brown algae blooming on the ocean.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Yue Zhang: orcid.org/0000-0002-5068-2260

ORCID for Sonia Heaven: orcid.org/0000-0001-7798-4683

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