CALORIMETRY OF TECHNICAL MICROBIAL REACTIONS

Heat generation is a very conspicuous phenomenon in large scale biorea ctors and could in principle quite easily be measured by the temperatu re increase of the cooling water. Taking yeast cultures growing on a m ixed oxido-reductive metabolism for various reasons as an example, thi s paper demonstrates how heat dissipation measurements may be used in combination with one other on-line measurement in order to obtain a qu antitative estimation of the nature of the on-going metabolism and of the current overall stoichiometry. The application of such measurement s to controlling fed-batch cultures is also discussed.