Development of an Aerobic Cultivation System by Using a Microbubble Aeration Technology

Abstract

Microbubble can extreamly enhance the gas–liquid mass transfer because of the increase in interfacial surface. For these characteristics, microbubble technologies have been widely applied to many technologies in recent years. In this work, we tried to apply a microbubble aeration technology to cultivation for aerobic yeast. Rhodoturula mucilaginosa YR-2 was used as yeast and cultivated. As a result, it revealed that it was possible to cultivate at a very low flow rate of microbubble aeration, which was between 1/100 and 1/10 of the gas flow rate required at conventional aeration by a sparger.