Background

Overview of Anaerobic Fermentation

Anaerobic fermentation is when tiny organisms, known as microorganisms, break down organic matter into things like lactic acid, alcohol, and gases, without needing any oxygen. In this setup, these microorganisms partially oxidize the organic stuff to create these products. Aerobic fermentation needs oxygen because the microbes have to breathe and do their thing, but anaerobic fermentation skips the oxygen entirely. Basically, it's just bacteria doing their job without any air involved.

Anaerobic fermentation is a big deal when it comes to handling organic waste and generating bioenergy — it's crucial for protecting the environment and making use of energy resources. However, there are a bunch of challenges, like not being super efficient, having trouble controlling pollution, and needing better tech. Without oxygen, this process doesn't use energy very efficiently and ends up making a lot of by-products, which can potentially harm the environment. Plus, you've got to be really careful to keep out any unwanted bacteria, as they can mess with how well the fermentation works and whether the products are safe.

Anaerobic fermentation tech, crucial for tackling organic waste and generating bioenergy, really needs some upgrades. We're talking about boosting the efficiency of the microorganisms doing the work, redesigning reactors, and getting better at separating and purifying the final products. Problems like high ammonia levels and easy acidification, which come with both wet and dry fermentation, need quick fixes. Even with these hurdles, innovative solutions tailored to handle various types of organic waste can still make a big impact on global issues like environmental damage and resource scarcity.

Fig. 1. Process of Biogas Production from Organic wastes via Anaerobic system. (Md, et al., 2022)

Applications of Anaerobic Fermentation

Anaerobic fermentation is a go-to method for supporting a circular economy and sustainability, but it still needs tweaks and upgrades to really shine in various areas.

• Dealing with Organic Waste: This process tackles everything from city sewage to kitchen scraps and farm waste. Sewage treatment plants use it to cut down and manage sludge effectively.
• Bioenergy Boost: By turning organic material into biogas, anaerobic fermentation provides renewable energy. Farms are using it to transform manure and plant leftovers into clean energy, cutting down on pollution.
• Cleaning Industrial Wastewater: Industries like food production, brewing, and sugar manufacture use this technology to handle heavy-duty organic waste. For instance, breweries often rely on it to treat wastewater, bringing down COD levels significantly.
• Resource Grab: Beyond energy, this tech helps reclaim valuable nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen from waste. In farming, for instance, it turns waste into rich fertilizers, boosting soil health.
• Advancing Green Tech: This fermentation method drives new eco-friendly solutions, like cleaning up landfills and polluted soil using bioremediation techniques.

Examples of Anaerobic Microbes

The vast use of anaerobic fermentation is impossible to separate from the great powers of anaerobic microorganisms that drive the right biochemical reactions in particular fermentations and are also of fundamental technical importance to most sectors. For example:

• Bacteria:

Methanogens: like Methanobacterium, which is also for making biogas.

Sulfate-Reducing Bacteria: Desulfovibrio for wastewater treatment and metal recovery.

• Fungi:

Yeasts: for example Saccharomyces cerevisiae, fermented by anaerobic process into ethanol.

Filamentous fungi: organic acid production, Penicillium for citric acid production.

• Anaerobic nitrogen-fixing bacteria:

Clostridium: like Clostridium acetobutylicum for butanol.

Creative BioMart Microbe is a fully integrated anaerobic fermentation solution for the support of customers to innovate smart and sustainable food, pharmaceutical, energy and environmental protection processes. You can contact us for more information at any time.

Service Procedure

Service Details

Strain Optimization and Screening Services

Our strain optimization and screening services employ the cutting edge biotechnologies to optimize strains for performance and product efficacy in anaerobic fermentations. To ensure robust fermentation activity under dynamic conditions, we have an answer for you. Apart from using commercial microbial library kits, you can also eliminate potential microbes by taking samples from nature. Then, by mutagenesis breeding, we retool these strains and weed out more productive strains. Together with modern genetic engineering technology, we can hack and tweak the strain's genome to optimize how it behaves under specific fermentation conditions. And finally, with continued test and optimization experiments, we make sure that the selected and developed strains can deliver on high yield requirements in industrial fermentation and are stable under big-scale fermentation.

Fermentation Process Monitoring and Optimization Services

The production stability and efficacy are the most important things during the anaerobic fermentation process with close monitoring and real-time data analysis. Our fermentation process monitoring and optimization service is dedicated to real-time tracking of different parameters of fermentation like temperature, pH, pressure, gas composition, etc. to determine the potential issues. Through advanced data analysis tools, we can quickly respond and adjust process conditions to ensure optimal operation of the entire process. At the same time, our services also include evaluation of fermentation process efficiency and providing optimization suggestions to improve product yield and production consistency. This service helps companies significantly reduce production costs while improving product quality.

Fermentation Product Separation and Purification

We use fermentation broth pretreatment to get rid of solid impurities and sanitize the liquid. Meanwhile, solid-liquid separators like centrifugation and membrane filtration are effective at extracting bacteria from fluids. Our crushing, leaching and extraction technologies for the purification of target products together with purification by adsorption, ion exchange and chromatography are our primary means. The high-purity products are obtained by very precise column chromatography and crystallization technologies in the refining process. Then, at last, they dry and package them in order to meet the demands of many different applications.

Recycling and Utilization of Organic Waste

One of the most widely used areas of anaerobic fermentation is environmental protection. By converting liquid and solid organic waste into valuable byproducts such as biogas and organic fertilizer, energy and resources can be recycled. Specific services include designing anaerobic fermentation processes to optimize biogas production, using the gas released from waste to generate electricity or prepare compressed natural gas (CNG), and extracting rich organic matter from the separated liquid for further fermentation or production of biodiesel.

Our Advantages

• Customized Solutions. We provide customized anaerobic fermentation solutions as per the requirement of the customer, with the highest efficiency and yield.
• Advanced Technology and Equipment. We can now track important fermenting variables (temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, etc.) with bioreactor technology and computerized control systems.
• Environmental Sustainability. We specialize in pollution reduction and enabling customers to meet environmental targets by optimizing fermentations to reduce waste and emissions.
• Comprehensive Technical Support. From project planning to execution, we provide a full range of technical support, including strain selection, culture medium preparation, process control and product separation and purification.

Case Study

Case Study 1: Characterization of anaerobic fermented forest litter fertilizer.

This study examined a new organic fertilizer made from fermented forest litter combined with agro-industrial by-products in an airtight environment. Under strict anaerobic conditions (0% initial oxygen concentration (IOC)), the 16-day batch culture exhibited a low CO₂ production rate (0.014 mL/h.g dry matter), compared to aerobic conditions (0.464 mL/h.g dm at 21% IOC). The culture emitted a slight fermented fruity odor due to ethanol and ethyl acetate presence (335 µL and 58.6 µL, respectively). Infrared spectroscopy revealed poor organic matter degradation, with the microbiome inclined towards lactic fermentation, increased lactic acid bacteria (LAB), reduced fungi, and no pathogens. At higher IOC levels, respirometric activity, and catabolic potential rose, though enterobacteria were found above 5% IOC, while ethanol and ethyl acetate decreased significantly.

Fig. 2. Ethanol and ethyl acetate production over 16 days under different IOCs (0–21%). (Gutierrez, et al., 2024)

Case Study 2: Boosting the bioplastics production through the fermentation of wastewater sludge.

It investigates how conventional wastewater is treated, then biorefineries converted to valuable bioplastics are created. Scientists can ferment anaerobic sludge with microbes to generate volatile fatty acids (VFA), the precursors for the biopolymers that would usher in a new era of petroleum plastics. The research highlights the impact of headspace volume on microbial communities and VFA production in a 225 L pilot plant. Using sludge from the UNIPA Campus wastewater treatment plant, they compared 40% and 60% headspace volumes and found that the 40% volume significantly increased VFA production by influencing the microbial community composition. This discovery suggests that adjusting headspace volume can enhance wastewater reuse and bioplastic production, supporting the transition to circular biorefineries.

Fig. 3. Oxygen requirements of the bacterial microbiota of T0-F1, TF-F1, T0-F2, TF-F2 samples. (Di Leto, et al., 2024)

Case Study 3: Unlocking the power of anaerobic digestion to produce biohydrogen.

Organic waste biohydrogen production is the remit of renewable energy. But it's technically limited in large-scale production – mainly by low hydrogen yields and poor microbial strains. To address these limitations, hydrogen-producing microorganisms were isolated from a full-scale anaerobic digestion unit treating complex organic waste, and the Clostridium sartagoforme SA1 strain was selected, which showed high hydrogen production on glucose, soluble starch, and carboxymethyl cellulose. Subsequently, this strain was applied to hydrogen production from organic fraction of municipal solid waste (OFMSW) rich in starch and cellulose, with a yield of 55 mL H₂/g VS. In addition, C. sartagoforme SA1 showed excellent hydrogen production performance even in the presence of the indigenous microbial community of OFMSW, with a 38% increase in hydrogen production, showing its strong adaptability in a highly competitive environment.

Fig. 4. Effect of pH on cellulases secreted by C. sartagoforme SA1 grown for 72 h in BA medium. (Faggian, et al., 2024)

FAQs

References:

1. Md AIS.; et al. Anaerobic fermentation technology for bioenergy generation from organic waste: An Overview. Sci J Energy Eng. 2022;10(1):8-11.
2. Gutierrez A.; et al. Biochemical and microbial characterization of a forest litter-based bio-fertilizer produced in batch culture by fermentation under different initial oxygen concentrations. World J Microbiol Biotechnol. 2024;40(11):353.
3. Di Leto Y.; et al. The effects of headspace volume reactor on the microbial community structure during fermentation processes for volatile fatty acid production. Environ Sci Pollut Res Int. Published online October 23, 2024.
4. Faggian L.; et al. Efficient production of hydrogen through bioaugmentation of the organic fraction of municipal solid waste by the newly isolated Clostridium sartagoforme SA1. Bioresour Technol. Published online October 18, 2024.