Customized design of electronic noses placed on top of air-lift bioreactors for in situ monitoring the off-gas patterns

ROSI P.; MISCORIA S.; BERNIK DELIA; NEGRI MARTÍN

BIOPROCESS AND BIOSYSTEMS ENGINEERING

SPRINGER

Lugar: Berlin; Año: 2012 vol. 35 p. 835 - 842

1615-7591

A specially designed electronic nose wascoupled to an air-lift bioreactor in order to perform on-linemonitoring of released vapors. The sensor array was placedat the top of the bioreactor sensing the headspace inequilibrium with the evolving liquor at any time withoutthe need of aspiration and pumping of gases into a sepa-rated sensor chamber. The device was applied to follow theoff-gas of a bioreactor with Acidithiobacillus thiooxidansgrown on beds of elemental sulfur under aerobic condi-tions. Evolution was monitored by acid titration, pH andoptical density measurements. The electronic nose wascapable to differentiate each day of reactor evolution sinceinoculation within periods marked off culture mediumreplacements using multivariate data analysis. Excellentdiscrimination was obtained indicating the potentiality foron-line monitoring in non-perturbed bioreactors. Theprospects for electronic nose/bioreactor merging are valu-able for whatever the bacterial strain or consortium used interms of scent markers to monitor biochemical processes.