Media Release

Karkala, May 21: A team of 4 final year BE students of NMAM Institute of Technology (NMAMIT), Ashwini G Shenoy, Inchara Crasta, Soumya Mahendra Rao, Udbhavi K B under the guidance of Venkatesh Kamath H, assistant professor and Dr C Vaman Rao, professor and head department of Biotechnology Engineering, designed a simplified consolidated bioprocess to produce bioethanol from pressed oil cake obtained after extraction of oil from Pongamia (Honge) oil cake.

This cake is a good source of complex carbohydrates that can be converted to bioethanol through microbial fermentation. Bacterial strain Bacillus cereus was used for the fermentation process. Further, to facilitate good fermentation conditions two types of bioreactors were also designed. A moving bed bioreactor (MBBR) and a wave bioreactor was designed with reactor volume of 100-200 ml.

Wave Bioreactor

Moving Bed Bioreactor

Of these, MBBR seems to be promising type of reactor and produced good yield of bioethanol. This process improved productivity and reduced time required for high ethanol yield.