Sensitivity of Bifurcation Traits to Model Parameters in Poly-β-hydroxybutryrate Production

There is growing interest in the chemical engineering community in the development of environmentally friendly products such as biopolymers. Poly-βhydroxybutyrate (PHB) is an important biopolymer whose commercial application is still limited due to the high costs associated with its production. This paper examines a continuous bioreactor proposed for the production of PHB. The influence of minor variations in the kinetic parameters of a simple cybernetic model formulated is examined. It is shown that minor variations in these parameters can have significant impacts on the bifurcation analyses obtained.