Revealing the factors influencing a fermentative biohydrogen production process using industrial wastewater as fermentation substrate

Revealing the factors influencing a fermentative biohydrogen production process using industrial wastewater as fermentation substrate

Biotechnology for Biofuels and Bioproducts, September 2014

25278996

Iulian Zoltan Boboescu, Mariana Ilie, Vasile Daniel Gherman, Ion Mirel, Bernadett Pap, Adina Negrea, Éva Kondorosi, Tibor Bíró, Gergely Maróti

Biohydrogen production through dark fermentation using organic waste as a substrate has gained increasing attention in recent years, mostly because of the economic advantages of coupling renewable, clean energy production with biological waste treatment. An ideal approach is the use of selected microbial inocula that are able to degrade complex organic substrates with simultaneous biohydrogen generation. Unfortunately, even with a specifically designed starting inoculum, there is still a number of parameters, mostly with regard to the fermentation conditions, that need to be improved in order to achieve a viable, large-scale, and technologically feasible solution. In this study, statistics-based factorial experimental design methods were applied to investigate the impact of various biological, physical, and chemical parameters, as well as the interactions between them on the biohydrogen production rates.