Production of highly efficient biomass-based microbial biopesticides significantly depends on downstream processing in terms of obtaining as high concentration of viable cells as possible. Microfiltration is one of the recommended operations for microbial biomass separation, but its main limitation is permeate flux decrease due to the membrane fouling. The effect of air sparging as a hydrodynamic technique for improvement of permeate flux during microfiltration of Bacillus velezensis cultivation broth was investigated. Modeling of the microfiltration was performed using the response surface methodology, while desirability function approach and genetic algorithm were applied for optimization, i.e., maximization of permeate flux and minimization of specific energy consumption. The results have revealed antagonistic relationship between the investigated dependent variables. The optimized values of superficial feed velocity and transmembrane pressure were close to the mean values of the investigated value ranges (0.68 bar and 0.96 m/s, respectively), while the optimized value of superficial air velocity had a more narrow distribution around 0.25 m/s. The results of this study have revealed a significant improvement of microfiltration performance by applying air sparging, thus this flux improvement method should be further investigated in downstream processing of different bacterial cultivation broths.
Keywords: Bacillus velezensis; desirability function; gas sparging; genetic algorithm; microbial biopesticide; microfiltration; permeate flux; response surface methodology; specific energy consumption.