Production of Lactic Acid from Cheese Whey by Repeated Batch and Continuous Cultures

This study is concerned with development of efficient culture methods for lactic acid fermentation of Lactobacillus sp. RKY2. The cell-recycle repeated batch fermentation using cheese whey and corn steep liquor as raw materials was tried in order to further enhance the productivity of lactic acid. In addition, fermentation efficiencies could be considerably enhanced by cell-recycle continuous culture. Through the cell-recycle repeated batch fermentation, lactic acid productivity was maximized to 6.34 $g/L{\cdot}h,$ which corresponded to 6.2 times higher value than that of the batch fermentation. During the cell-recycle continuous fermentation, the last dry cell weight at the end of fermentation could be increased to 25.3 g/L.