Protein Supplement production in industrial sector – Part 4

Protein Supplement production in industrial sector – Part 4

Steriliser Options

The purpose of a sterile process is to ensure the integrity of the product of the process. As the process involves the growth of a micro-organism for the consumption of humans the degree of sterilisation is of great importance. This is then achieved by making
sure all reactants enter the fermentation reactor under sterile reactions. The biggest undertaking this requires is therefore the sterilising of the substrate feed. Both batch and continuous sterilisation processes can be adopted in the fermentation industry.
The advantages of batch sterilisation over continuous sterilisation are:

• Lower capital costs.

• Easier manual control.

• Lower risk of contamination. This is because continuous processes require aseptic transfer and sterile vessel.

• Easier for the media containing a high proportion of solid matter.

The main disadvantage of a batch sterilization unit is that medium denaturation affects the fermentation adversely. On the other hand, advantages of continuous sterilization over batch sterilization are:

• Superior maintenance of medium quality.

• The reduction of the degree of nutrient degradation

• Easier automatic control.

• Shorter sterilisation cycle time.

• Less surge capacity for steam.

• Less fermentor corrosion.

In the design, operation of a culture fermentation process on a fed-batch basis requires a continuous supply of sterilised medium. By comparing both types of sterilisations, a continuous sterilizer is chosen is also because it often results in an improvement
of the process and offers operational advantages.

Commonly, there are two types of continuous steriliser which may be used for the treatment of the fermentation media. They are the continuous-plate heat exchanger and the continuous injector-flash cooler.

The continuous plate heat exchanger steriliser consists of a series of steam-heated plates against which the medium is circulated to raise the temperature to the desired level, at which the medium is maintained for a holding period and then cooled to the
fermentation temperature in another plate heat exchanger.

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Posted by Ahmed Tariq on Jan 20 2012. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry