CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Executive Summary
Recycling of agricultural wastes into value-added products offers insurmountable advantages such as economic-value enhancement and also creation of zero waste. For an agriculture-intensive country like Malaysia, the abundantly-available organic wastes such as banana stem provide an opportunity for the conversion into highly-sought compounds such as ferulic acid. Ferulic acid is well known for its anti-oxidation properties. Conventional ferulic acid production comes from several pathways such as from corn cobs as substrate via alkaline hydrolysis, Streptomyces avermitilis-treated sugar beet pulp as well as wheat bran fermented by Staphylococcus aureus. . In the current work, banana stem was employed as substrate whilst cost-free soil mixed culture was collected from banana plantation to serve as inoculum. The inoculum was mixed with substrate in an incubator shaker to allow the aerobic fermentation process followed by sample collection at every 6-hours interval for the next 72 hours. HPLC (high performance liquid chromatography) analysis was performed to determine the amount of ferulic acid presence. To the best of our existing knowledge, ferulic acid from banana stem waste is the first attempt and was never reported before; hence the kinetic is not well-understood. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to determine the kinetic constant (Km and Vmax) by using Michaelis –Menten equation. From this research, kinetic constants, Km and Vmax, from Michaelis–Menten correlation using Runge-Kutta 4th method can be used for process scale up.
1. Motivation, problem statement and brief review
Previously, when logging activities or after a harvest operation from paddy or wheat farm was carried out, the residues were burnt or used as solid foods for livestock (Gil et al, 2011). This will deteriorate the surrounding environment and bring a serious impact to the health of human beings. Therefore, utilization of...