Extraction of succinic acid from real fermentation broth via emulsion liquid membrane

Abstract

Succinic acid is listed as one of the twelve building block chemicals based on the ease of production through a biotechnological approach and potential to derive various chemicals. The application of bio-based succinic acid is still limited due to high downstream processing costs. One of the potential methods to recover succinic acid is emulsion liquid membrane (ELM). The ELM system consists of three main liquid phases; external feed, membrane, and internal. In this study, the membrane phase was prepared by dissolving Amberlite LA2 as a carrier, sorbitan monooleate (Span 80) and polyoxyethylenesorbitan monooleate (Tween 80) as surfactants in commercial grade palm oil, while the internal phase comprised of sodium carbonate solution, Na 2 CO 3 . The influence of emulsifying time, agitation speed, and agitation time on the water-in-oil-in-water (W/O/W) emulsion stability were studied. The most stable condition was implemented on various external phase concentrations to study the extraction and recovery performances. The results showed that the most stable emulsion was obtained at 5 minutes of emulsifying time, 300 rpm of agitation speed and 3 minutes of agitation time. The emulsion produced was able to provide a balanced result between stability and ELM performance as it was able to extract almost 100% of succinic acid with 98% recovery. The finding of this study showed ELM process as the potential technology to extract succinic acid produced from fermentation.