Beer, kombucha, or vinegar perk up any meal – but manufacturing it at scale and to standard requires a closer look at what goes in their vats and fermenters. It is these spaces where the magic brews but this is also where manufacturers can optimise their processes with the right blowers, compressors and above all configuration.
Primary fermentation in brewery tanks by major India breweries aerates wort with compressed air to propagate yeast (Saccharomyces), converting sugars to alcohol and CO2. Indian dairy majors require aerated vats for Lactobacillus and Streptococcus thermophilus cultures in products like dahi and lassi. Compressed air bubbling maintains dissolved oxygen levels during incubation, scaling to billions of litres.
If you are a manufacturer of these products you may be familiar with the processes we will explain here. But you may be surprised that there are improvements that are waiting to be implemented.
Fermentation production process
The process in which sugars are transformed into a new product through chemical reactions is made possible by microorganisms. Yeast is the most important type of fermentation here. It begins with the preparation of raw materials with pure yeast culture and molasses, followed by the production of seed yeast before moving on to the main fermentation with the main reactions. Separation and washing follows next with chilled cream yeast storage before it is put through a rotary filter drum to crumbled yeast which is extruded and dried to give instant dry yeast, compressed yeast, and cream yeast.
The pattern of bacterial growth through the phases are what make a successful recipe (this is what the process is referred to):
1. Initial phase: This phase involves mixing the basic ingredients with a minimum amount of liquid at around 300 mbar (for lower pressure applications) to get the process going.
2. Growth phase: This phase sees an exponential growth in bacteria and involves adding the liquid ingredients.
3. Stabilizing phase: This phase involves keeping growth constant on a high level and adding the liquid ingredients.
4. Harvesting phase: This phase seeds reduction in growth and involves relieving the final product from tank.
This above process is called a recipe in the fermentation business and it is critical to have an articulate recipe in order to achieve a good end result. This can be translated into a flow demand profile. The flow demand depends on the amount of liquid in the fermenter and on the bacterial growth.
Discover Atlas Copco’s blowers and compressors for optimal fermentation
LIVE CASE: The typical set up and the turnaround
The installation shown here should be familiar to older plants. This shows multiple centrifugal units. Let’s share a case story from one of Atlas Copco’s customers which has 52 plants in 32 countries (including India, China, Mexico, and Brazil).
How things stood at this specific plant: The plant had a 6+1 installation operating at 800 mbars and turbo units (500 kW installed). The header was undersized for the 6 units – and this was the obvious bottleneck/challenge since the flow is very high so a very large header would be needed for all these units.
The problem
The customer wasn't able to create the recipe as per their requirement because the fermentation did not take place due to lack of the ideal pressure / air in the system. No blow off valves were installed on turbos; it depended solely on the blow off valve in the main header itself. This was of course not good enough to get the articulation needed in the line. So an on-off blow off valve was installed but even this did not have the required articulation so the customer had to install their own proportional blow off valves to play around with the flow to get the recipes out. In spite of all this, operations were not reliable and it resulted in an impeller crash on the standby unit. To top it all, energy consumption was on the higher side.
The solution
So the approach that was taken was to replace some of the centrifugal units with a new approach to fermentation: where per fermenter, multiple units would have a backup so that the required recipe can be consistently provided while still having a back up for each fermenter to make sure operations are stable. In this case it came up to 4 Atlas Copco ZS blowers and one backup for each fermenter. Ten Atlas Copco ZS blowers units were provided in the first batch and 5 Atlas Copco ZS blowers units were supplied in a follow-up order with the Atlas Copco Optimizer ensuring energy-savings on top of it all.
Insight
No pressure overshoot
Advanced controllability
Better process flexibility for the customer
Back-up availability
Each unit operating in SER sweetspot
Atlas Copco’s ZS5 blower in particular is a highly competitive product sought out for its SER and turndown ratios but installation itself is critical in ensuring savings for the customers.
Discover Atlas Copco’s blowers and compressors for optimal fermentation
A new frontier: biomass fermentation & precision fermentation
There are pilot projects by GoodDot and Imagine Meats in India, where single-cell proteins from yeast on biomass hydrolysates support animal feed and human nutrition bars. How it works is that you take the sample from any animal and then ferment this piece of meat to get a whole cut steak. It comes very close to the texture of real animal meat but without the animal.
In precision fermentation, microbes are engineered to secrete specific proteins, such as animal-free whey or casein for dairy alternatives. Companies like Brown Revolution produce fermented whey protein for ice creams and cheeses with biomass sugars as feedstock. Startups like Zero Cow Factory use precision tech on biomass-derived glucose for lab-grown fats and caseins in plant-based butter and yoghurt.
The future and ZS5 VSD oil-free screw blowers
Opting for an energy-efficient solution such as Atlas Copco’s ZS screw blowers results in a payback of your investment over time. A seemingly small design change can help you maximize your energy savings and the uptime of your production process. Through constant innovation and research, we can offer you an energy-efficient and reliable range of screw blower solutions up to 1.5 bar(g)/ 22 psig.
Atlas Copco’s ZS screw blower is a small and compact blower that can be installed anywhere, even side-by-side. The compact blower units are easy to maintain and fit perfectly into existing blower rooms. They can also be placed outside in the toughest environments, allowing an ambient temperature of up to 50°C/120°F.
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