Produção de biobutanol a partir de sorgo sacaríneo por meio de processos biotecnológicos

Abstract

The biobutanol production by fermentative process has a great importance to increase the global supply of biofuel and becomes these able to replace the use of fossil fuel. The main difficulty associated to this production occurs due the not economic viability of applied production process. The aspects that have more contribution to this are the product inhibition at low concentration, low titer and the use of expensive substrates. This work is divided in four scientific articles which are focused in question involved to this solvent production. The first two are review papers about the topic, whereas the last two are research papers related to development of analytical methods and production process. The first paper reports to the main process development since 1980 year, by analyses of registered patents in relation to butanol production worldwide. The second paper presents a review from scientific articles about butyric fermentation published in recent years. The central characteristic of it is show the main troubles related to production, exhibiting the importance of the used substrate, as well as the choice of microorganism and separation process. Third paper presents a methodology to solvents determination from fermentation medium. This technique proposes a linear relationship between the density variation, sugar and solvents concentrations. The method proposed showed good results being promising to predict the ABE concentration in an easy and fast procedure. Fourth paper reports the development of the process to production of biobutanol by clostridial fermentation from sweet sorghum juice. Butanol is produced from substrate and small addition of yeast extract and tryptone, using 12.5% of initial inoculums size, at initial pH pH value equal to 5.5. In this work was demonstrated the possibility to produce biobutanol from sweet sorghum.