Project Goals and Objectives

Project Goal

The main goal for this project is to convert the food waste generated by Virginia Tech into glutamic acid to make a profit for the university.

Goals:

Learn how different types of food waste affect anaerobic digestion yields
Cultivate knowledge on how to read and interpret data like HPLC and Raman results
Further improve the anaerobic digestion method
Improve our understanding of how to culture and increase bacteria yield
Deliver a working simulation and economic analysis of our SuperPro Design

Pursue either pre-consumer or post-consumer waste for anaerobic digestion after using HPLC result to determine which one produced the most acetic acid
Improve the acetic acid production in the anaerobic digestion by controlling pH and nitrogen; HPLC will once again be used to find the amount of acetic acid being produced
Purchase Coynebacterium glutamicum and beef extract by March 16th
Culture the Corynebacterium glutamicum by March 25th
Grow the Corynebacterium glutamicum in the digestate from the anaerobic digestion; if it grow then the project can move on to the next step
Use HPLC results from anaerobic digestion to develop a kinetic model for optimizing the process flow diagram; this should reflect some of the results from previous experiments
Used Raman Spectroscopy results of glutamic acid production to measure the amount of Corynebacterium glutamicum produced
Ensure that all aspects of the process flow diagram are optimized to have the greatest profit by using the economic functions in SuperPro Designer