Study on Molasses Concentration from Sugarcanne Bagasse for Biohydrogen Production using Enriched Granular Activated Carbon (GAC) Immobilised Cells by Repeated Batch Cultivation

School of Environmental Engineering, Universiti Malaysia Perlis, Arau, Perlis, 02600, Malaysia

^* Corresponding author: nabilahaminah@yahoo.com

Abstract

Repeated batch cultivation is known as most attractive method in improving hydrogen productivity, due to the facts that this approach could minimize the reuse of the cell and the inoculum preparation. In addition, with the combination of attach growth system during the fermentation processes to produce biohydrogen, the density of cells will be increased and the cell washout could be avoided. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the effectiveness of repeated batch cultivation for enrichment of anaerobic mixed culture onto granular activated carbon (GAC) and investigate the effect of molasses concentration during immobilization of mixed culture onto the GAC. The molasses concentration using 50 %, 40 %, 30 %, 20 % and 10 % of diluted molasses were used as feedstock in the fermentation process. The maximum hydrogen production of 60 ml was obtained at 30 % of molasses concentration with 831 ppm of hydrogen concentration. Thus, the kinetic parameter obtained from the batch profiling based on modified Gompertz equation are, H_m= 58 ml for the maximum hydrogen production and R_m= 2.02 ml/h representing the hydrogen production rate.