From the inventory of a cell by –omics to synthetic biology, from strain development to industrial biotechnological processes including downstream processing
VOLATILE is a large scale project in the frame of Horizon 2020 involving 21 industry and research partners from nine European countries.
The project’s intention is to develop a Volatile Fatty Acids Platform (VFAP) for the economic utilization of municipal as well as industrial biowaste. Fatty acids will continuously be recovered from anaerobic digestion processes applying membrane technology and will be provided for value added fermentation approaches:
The evolvement of the new value-added chains will be supported by findings of executed case studies and market analyses. Furthermore, the processes will be optimized applying agent-based modeling. To ensure environmentally friendly and economical reasonable process design, VOLATILE additionally will be accompanied by a life cycle assessment (LCA) and an economic feasibility study. Business cases will be developed and a CEN workshop will support standardization on “Sustainable use of municipal solid and sludgy biowaste for added value biomolecules for industrial application”.
These recommendations of Working Group Upstream Processing of the DECHEMA expert group “Single-use technology in biopharmaceutical manufacturing” aim to select suitable experimental methods for the characterisation of single-use bioreactors (SUB) and mixers (SUM). The described methods are applicable to a broad range of of single-use systems and applications. The guidelines can also be used for the engineering characterisation of reusable systems. Furthermore, these process engineering characterisation methods intend to offer manufacturers and operators of SUB and SUM a uniform set of methods and instruments through validated Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).