Kinetics Study of Ethanol Fermentation Process by Saccharomyces Cerevisiae

Chemical Engineering

The depletion of fossil fuel reserves, the unstable panorama of the petrol prices and more recently, increasing environmental and political pressures has increased industrial focus toward alternative fuel sources, and encouraged the search of products originated from biomass, as renewable sources of energy. In this context, fermentative processes stand out, where microbial metabolism is used for the transformation of simple raw materials in products with high aggregate value. Among these, ethanol is one of the best examples of how fermentation can match market needs satisfactorily. Ethanol is used in various segments of industries, for e.g., medical, recreational and the most important, fuel industry as an additive. Hence vast research in this segment needs to be done. The study investigates the fermentation kinetics for ethanol production through the yeast Saccharomyces Cerevisiae. The study will help in various aspects of fermentor design and in setting the parameters of fermentation to carry out the fermentation smoothly and get maximum yields. The following study has been done by using glucose as the substrate. The yeast estimation, ethanol estimation as well as the sugar estimation has been carried out. Optical density method has been used for yeast estimation while Cole’s method has been used for sugar estimation. For the ethanol estimation alcoholmeter has been used. The specific rate constant (µ) has been calculated to be 0.818 hours-1.

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