How far do we need to go to upscale carbon elongation from bench- to industrial-scale?

Microbial carboxylate chain elongation (CCE) from realistic biowastes faces unresolved bench-to-industrial translation limits, especially from gas–liquid mass transfer, pH control, solids retention, and product recovery constraints.

• Why it matters: Bench-scale CCE has been studied, but industrial biorefinery use is unclear when feedstocks are real biowastes rather than model substrates. The review targets the missing process-translation understanding needed for practical upscaling.
• What they did: The work classifies biowastes by carbohydrate, lignocellulosic, protein, and lipid composition, then discusses pretreatment needs before secondary fermentation and scale-dependent constraints. It also includes thermodynamic analysis of how gas composition responses vary with substrate.
• The result: It proposes an integrated biorefinery framework and suggests that separating hydraulic retention time from solids retention time via biomass retention could support stable continuous operation, while noting remaining uncertainties in flux, fouling, and membrane cost.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.