PhD Thesis: Fungal-based biorefinery for food industries

Starch is a major component of our food and even materials. There are a number of companies in the world that produce starch from e.g. potato and wheat. However, the residuals of the potato and wheat ends up in dirty wastewater that is not so easy to treat by wastewater treatment plants; and the companies have to pay a lot of money to get rid of it. Now, the question is if we can convert these waste and wastewater into something useful? 

It was the topic of PhD thesis of our PhD candidate Pedro Ferreira de Souza Filho. He worked on converting these types of wastes to fungi for animal feed and also some kind of bioplastic materials. He has now nailed his thesis and will defend it in 3 weeks. I wish him good luck. Here is his PhD thesis on “Fungi-based biorefinery model for food industry waste: Progress toward a circular economy“. He has also published these articles:

1- Production of Edible Fungi from Potato Protein Liquor (PPL) in Airlift Bioreactor. 

2- Techno-Economic and Life Cycle Assessment of Wastewater Management from Potato Starch Production: Present Status and Alternative Biotreatments. 

3- Edible protein production by filamentous fungi using starch plant wastewater. 

4- Vegan-mycoprotein concentrate from pea-processing industry byproduct using edible filamentous fungi. 

5- A solvent free approach for production of films from pectin and fungal biomass.

PhD Thesis on textile-based bioreactors

There are millions of bioreactors in the world for production of ethanol, biogas, antibiotics, lactic acid and other materials. These bioreactors are principally some tanks with some control equipment that should be tight, tolerate all the chemicals and microorganisms inside and the conditions and weather outside and also the pressure of the liquid. These bioreactors are normally made of stainless steel. However, the question is if we can make it of textile that could be cheaper and movable?

It is now many years that we are working with a company to develop such bioreactors. They look like a big bag, but actually not! Alex Osagie Osadolor has worked for 4 years to consider the design aspects of such textile-based bioreactors for production of biogas, ethanol and fungi. The questions are for example the pressure that the liquid and gas can put on the reactor material, or the mixing and movement of the materials inside it!

Alex has nailed his PhD thesis yesterday and will defend it on 6 April. We wish him good luck!

Here is the link to his thesis of "Design and Development of a Novel Textile-based Bioreactor: Ethanol and biogas production as case studies" that include these papers:

1- Introducing textiles as material of construction of ethanol bioreactors

2- Development of novel textile bioreactor for anaerobic utilization of flocculating yeast for ethanol production

3- Membrane stress analysis of collapsible tanks and bioreactors

4- Empirical and experimental determination of the kinetics of pellet growth in filamentous fungi: A case study using Neurospora intermedia

5- Cost effective dry anaerobic digestion in textile bioreactors

6- Effect of media rheology and bioreactor hydrodynamics on filamentous fungi fermentation of lignocellulosic and starch-based substrates under pseudoplastic flow conditions