Project
Call for partners | FEVIS - FErmentation VIsualized and Simplified
Fermentation processes produce high-value products, but scaling up presents challenges, resulting in lower performance at larger scales. Optical spectroscopy sensors offer real-time insights into the fermentation process. The project aims to translate this technology to the fermentation industry for better reproducibility and continuous high performance. It involves optimizing fermentations from companies in the probiotics, starter culture and single cell protein space, potentially accelerating process scaling and yield optimization efforts.
Challenges in Scaling Fermentation Processes
Fermentation processes of raw materials and side-stream food wastes are widely performed to obtain high valued products such as vitamins, protein, antibodies, alcohols etc. In many cases scaling of fermentation processes comes with a variety of challenges and besides that clear lower performance is observed at larger scale. Due to the lack of measurement of the fermentation it is in general a challenging process. To determine the causes of the lower performance, general analytical tools for reactor environment are available (see e.g. freesense.dk), but they do not provide information on the cellular status, growth rates and nutrient concentrations. Such information can be acquired by sampling, however given that such fermentations may last for longer than 24 hours, sampling is difficult to schedule during night time and therefore adds significantly to the overall costs of such processes.
Using optical spectroscopy as a solution for high quality fermentation processes
This might be solved by use of visual spectroscopy analytics that will allow continuous analysis of a specific fermentation. This analytical technology is already widely used in general process control and even for high value fermentations such as wine fermentation. However, the translation to the general fermentation space for the production of mycoproteins, probiotics and fermented plant-based foods has not been made so far. In this project we would like to test if it is possible to initiate this translation to improve the reproducibility of fermentations going from lab-scale to industrial scale and to ensure continuous high performances at the large scale. The main innovation of the project lies in the fact that with the help of optical spectroscopy sensors detailed real-time insights to the physicochemical changes during the fermentation processes will be gained. Such information about the fermentation processes is currently lacking for the fermentation processes considered in this study. Such detailed insight will allow a better understanding and control of processes to achieve consistent high-quality products with minimum energy usage.
Joining Forces: Collaborating with Industrial Partners to Revolutionize quality control in microbial processes
We welcome industrial partners to join our public-private partnership at WFBR, where we aim to revolutionize the quality control of fermentations in all fields. We are looking for companies in the probiotics, starter culture and single cell protein production space to work together with us for their process optimization.