Customer Reviews

Principles of Fermentation Technology, Second Edition

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This book is a must for people interested in fermentation technology and bioprocess engineering. It covers a wide variety of topics: from microbial screening to effluent treatment. In between all the aspects of fermentation are covered: inoculum, sterilization, media development, monitoring and control, aeration and agitation, fermenter vessels and design, downstream processing, economics. I think that anyone in the biochemical engineering/biotechnology field should have it.

This book is a great reference for ferm scientists with a focus on the more engineering specific aspects of fermentation. It's got good coverage of a lot of old-school topics that are considered "solved problems" and so don't really appear in many contemporary books. It's got good information on oxygen transfer correlations to agitation, and how to measure KLA, for example. There is a pretty good discussion of media composition considerations. There's a good overview of the basics of environmental controls (pH, dO2, etc), and controller methodology. There's also a good overview of fermentor design considerations.

Given that the book is so aimed at the bioprocess engineer, I'd like to have seen a bigger discussion of scale-up / scale-down. That's an area that's always challenging, but there are only a couple of pages devoted to the topic.

If you are a fermentation scientist with an engineering bent, or a manufacturing sciences person tasked with supporting upstream operation, this is probably a must-have book. I haven't found any more current book than this for covering upstream process engineering topics. The book is weak on the molecular biology side, but that's really too big a topic to merge with the process side.

Overall this book brings together a lot of diverse information that's useful to the practicing engineer. You probably have a lot of this information that you will have accumulated over the years, but it's great to have one reference that covers it in a concise way.