Studies on the contamination of feed molasses for continuous ethanol production in an immobilised yeast cell reactor

With the present world problem of fossil fuel limitations, alcohol production from renewable resources such as sugar cane molasses, particularly by continuous processes, has become important. In continuous processing, feed contamination problems could become critical. A useful inexpensive technique, which can minimise these problems when molasses is used as the substrate, is to ensure that the time period elapsing after dilution of molasses and before feeding to the reactor is minimal. Experiments were conducted to determine how long the clarified molasses feed solution could be kept under non-sterile conditions without affecting the performance of an immobilised whole cell reactor for alcohol production. For this purpose, the fastest growing contaminant (under the prevailing conditions) present in molasses feed solution was isolated by plating technique. From the initial total number of contaminant microorganisms in the feed solution, and from the experimentally determined generation time of the fastest growing contaminant cells, the safe period of storage of diluted molasses was calculated. This value was in reasonable agreement with the experimental observations.