A Bacterial Hydrogen Production Test System for Measuring H₂ Concentrations in Liquids and Gases

The hydrogen production by biological processes using fermentative micro-organisms is an environment-friendly way for storage and use of energy. A laboratory-scale model of the fermentation system was developed and tested, which allows studying the kinetics of hydrogen production by a standard Escherichia coli MSCL (Microbial Strain Collection of Latvia) strain 332 used as indicator at the sanitary analyses of water. In this work, we compared the hydrogen concentrations in liquid (the cultivation media) and gaseous environments. During the anaerobic growth of E. coli MSCL332 bacteria in glucose-containing media a hydrogen over-saturation in the liquid phase was observed. The maximum of dissolved hydrogen concentration (2481 μmol/l) was reached by the fourth hour of fermentation, while for gaseous phase the mass-spectrometric analysis showed that hydrogen of the highest concentration occupied only 0.4% volume.