Evaluation of model parameters for growth, tannic acid utilization and tannase production in Bacillus gottheilii M2S2 using polyurethane foam blocks as support

Production of tannase from B. gottheilii M2S2 was studied under solid-state fermentation with an optimized medium consisting of polyurethane foam matrix of dimension 40 × 40 × 5 mm, impregnated with a liquid medium comprising (w/v): 4% tannic acid; 2% NH₄NO₃; 0.1% KH₂PO₄; 0.2% MgSO₄; 0.1% NaCl and 0.05% CaCl₂·2H₂O in distilled water, having a pH of 4.7. Maximum tannase production of 56.87 U/L was obtained after 32 h of fermentation at 32 °C in static condition. This study deals with the evaluation of unstructured kinetic models to understand the behavior of biomass, tannase production and tannic acid degradation, with the fermentation time. The growth rate of B. gottheilii M2S2 was 0.0703 h⁻¹ at 32 h of fermentation. Product (Y_x/s) and biomass yield (Y_p/s) coefficients were estimated as 1.77 U/g of tannic acid and 0.276 g of biomass/g of tannic acid. All the kinetic constants µ, α, β, m and n were evaluated using MATLAB 2015Rb program. The experimental and model-generated data showed a good correlation, which indicated that these models will describe tannase production and fermentation process.