DelftX: Industrial Fermentation

After this course all learners will be in a position to:

• Describe the essence of industrial fermentation
• Utilize insights gained to design an industrial scale quantitative fermentation plant
• Explain the causes and remedies for scale-up issues, from lab to factory
• Apply the insights to suggest improvements for industrial fermentation processes and design of down-scaled lab-scale simulators

Getting started and introduction is included in Week 1

Unit 1. Industrial Fermentation

• Industrial Fermentation: the Great Adventure?
• Industrial Fermentation Essentials (preliminary title)
• Benefits for society and sustainability - evaluating the effects of biobased production (preliminary title)
• Process to produce bio-PDO (1,3-Propanediol)
• Renewable Feedstocks for Fermentation (preliminary title)

Unit 2. Balances and Microbial Rates

• Microorganisms and their function in nature
• Functional understanding of nutrient requirements for microbial growth
• Learning about the process: broth balances
• Learning about the process: gas-phase balances
• Learning about the microorganism: q-rates and chemostat
• Learning about the process and organism: batch
• Extra guest lecture: balances
• Extra: banana skins
• PDO case
• Best practice: mixed cultures

Unit 3. The Black Box Model and Process Reaction

• The process reaction
• Basics of the black box model
• Energy consuming and energy producing products
• A PDO black box model: experiments for parameter identification
• Black box models: The PDO process reaction as function of μ
• PDO continuous process design: calculation of inputs and outputs using the process reaction
• Aerobic PDO process: improving sustainability
• Introduction to Metabolic Flux Analysis
• PDO case
• Best practice: succinic acid

Unit 4. Fermentation Design

• Introduction to fermentation technology
• The large-scale fermenter
• Fermenter operation
• Gas transport
• Heat transport
• Mixing
• Basic approach to design and then optimize a PDO fermentation process
• PDO case
• Best practice: artemisinin

Unit 5. Scale-down and Scale-up

• Introduction to scale-effects
• Similarity and scaling approaches
• Scaling Macro- Micro-balances
• Dimensional scaling
• Computational fluid dynamics for scaling
• Industrial examples

Unit 6. Wrap-up

• Closing lecture: Industrial Fermentation: where we are now, and where we will go?
• Final assessment

Over 25 employees of Zymergen participated in the online course "Industrial Biotechnology" offered by TU Delft. This resulted in increased understanding of microbial physiology and fermentation technology and how to scale up bioproduction processes. Through this course, the quality of our R &D work will further improve and timelines for commercialization of bioprocesses will be shortened.

Stefan de Kok, Director Fermentation - Zymergen