The use of renewable raw materials by employing enzymatic synthesis of biobased chemicals and the fermentative production of biocatalysts or other metabolic products, for example organic solvents and acids, are objectives defined by the working group “Biotechnological Processes”.
The fermentation technology is supplemented by a cultivation platform for microalgae. As a natural and sustainable aquatic source of raw materials that makes available a wide range of basic chemical substances (e.g. essential fatty acids, vitamins or pigments) and provides an easily fermentable biomass, microalgae provide an ideal platform for coupled material/energetic processes.
The team possesses broadly based bioprocess engineering expertise in the feld of scale-up and process intensification.The processes developed on the laboratory scale in terms of their transferability to an industrially relevant scale are evaluated in the preliminary stages and are optimized repetitively during transfer and scale-up. This includes, for example, the adjustment of process control strategies (batch, fed-batch, continuous) and integrated product purification to reduce the number of process steps or the reutilization of the biocatalysts (e.g. by immobilization on carrier materials).