Techno-economic assessment of Bacillus fermentation to produce surfactin and lichenysin
Réka Czinkóczky, Áron Németh
Abstract
The useful products like enzymes and biosurfactants render Bacilli good candidates for bioprocesses. Despite the lack of the few reports on Bacilli based technologies, we aimed the development of a sustainable and zero-waste bioprocess involving the fermentation of Bacillus as a core. The aim of this work was to observe and compile all the experimental data necessary to construct a process simulation and then conduct insilico investigations to overcome some techno-economic bottlenecks of biosurfactant production. Techno-economic simulations presented here are based on a lab-scale verified process and were carried out using SuperPro Designer®. The optimal scenario applies foam collector cyclones and its minimal necessary scale for cost efficiency (i.e. of which NPV is zero) has 18,242 kg/y capacity of surfactin. Sensitivity analysis revealed that the model is relatively sensitive against changes in facility dependent costs, but almost insensitive against the other cost types. The usefulness of equipment sharing between two product lines is also considered: for investments by small and medium-sized enterprises, the application of shared devices is suggested due to their lower investment costs, however, it would be advantageous for an enterprise to own separated equipment lines in terms of productivity as the idle time would be reduced.