Mass transfer of gas to liquid is an important step in aerobic fermentations and its importance has been emphasized recently since syngas fermentation, which converts carbon monoxide and hydrogen into alcohols or organic acids, has received considerable attention as a promising alternative for biofuel production. For the embodiment of efficient mass-transfer of gases into solution, the size of bubbles in the reactor should be reduced as small as possible. Although the sparger with small pore size have been used, it is difficult to obtain the desirable bubble formation because the instability of bubble resulted in larger size bubbles. Here, we designed a metallic sparger of which surface was controlled by the deposition of silica via chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method to obtain smaller size bubbles. Introduction of silica thin film give a hydrophilic nature on the surface of sparger and could change the wetting properties of the gas bubbles on the surface, thus producing microbubbles. On the other hand, the surface of sparger turned into hydrophobic when chemical treatment of silazane compounds was done on the silica thin film. The bubble size of the hydrophobic sparger became rather bigger than that of untreated sparger, implying that the control of wetting characteristics of sparger is important to maximize the gas transfer into solution.

Design of a sparger modified through deposition of silica for enhancement of gas transfer in bioreactor

248th National Meeting (2014)

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