Anaerobic Fermentation

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 BACKGROUND

As world’s petroleum supplies are becoming less, attention has been focused to find the alternative sources of fuels for engines. The non-renewable nature and limited resources of petroleum fuels have become a major concern. Currently, the consumption of petroleum is very fast compared to their natural production around the world. The present reservation of fuels used in internal combustion (IC) engines estimate to be depleted within 40 years based on the increasing of the consuming rate. It has been very important to study the alternative sources of fuel either diesel or gasoline because of the concern towards the availability and the price of petroleum based fuels. All of these reasons have drawn

Fermentation can be divided into two types of fermentation, which are aerobic fermentation and anaerobic fermentation. Both process undergoes different requirement, aerobic fermentation required oxygen throughout the process while, anaerobic fermentation not required any oxygen. Microbial fermentation is using microbes to utilize the substrate and divided based on the types of fermentation. In this study, only anaerobic fermentation was consumed since, clostridium species are used for acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) fermentation, which

ABE fermentation does not required oxygen during the process. ABE fermentation is the most economic process to produce valuable product especially butanol that can used as combustion engine in

It was developed by thechemist Chaim Weizmann and was the primary process used to make acetone during World War I, such as to produce cordite. The process is anaerobic (done in the absence of oxygen), similar to how yeast ferments sugars to produce ethanol for wine, beer, or fuel. The process produces these solvents in a ratio of 3-6-1, or 3 parts acetone, 6 parts butanol and 1 part ethanol. It usually uses a strain of bacteria from the Clostridia Class [Clostridium Family]. Clostridium acetobutylicum is the most well-known strain, although Clostridium beijerinckii has also been used for this process with good