If you believe strain development is tough - try scale-up!

Large scale fermenters are inevitable to meet the volumes for commercial and fully industrialized applications. This is especially true for commodity or drop-in chemicals. While anaerobic yeast fermentations for ethanol have achieved Scale-Up sizes of over 2,000m³ already, the bacterial fermentations yet need to proof their viability in this scale. thyssenkrupp Industrial solutions, the former Uhde group, has not only scaled-up micro aerobic E. coli fermenters for Succinic Acid to 400m³ industrial conditions (jointly with Myriant Corporation) in Lake Providence, LA - tkIS went further. In Leuna, Germany, tkIS operates a fully industrialized 24/7 multi-purpose demonstration scale facility including maintenance, laboratory, technical, pilot and full-scale blue collar operations from 1L to 85,000L fermenter volume and a complete chemical downstream. Here, we have developed the Uhde-Lactic Acid process based on very robust wildtype Bacillus coagulans strains, backed up by our extensive know-how in downstream processing and chemical engineering. Besides that, tkIS is a global operating technology driven EPC contractor. How do we take up the real challenge in commercializing a bio-based product, and move beyond the financial and technical `valley of death´ - scaling-up fermentation processes beyond the 1,000L pilot scale? How does this information feed backwards into scale-down again and guiding process and strain development? How do you make several hundred-ton size micro aerobic fed-batch fermenters run in parallel with blue collar operators? We will tell you of our journey so far.