BACKGROUND: The large-scale development of various bioprocesses has posed a problem because of the inherent complexities of biological systems. This is because of the lack of discretion in the use of conventional chemical reactors to carry out complex bioreactions. Existing scale-up methods for bioprocesses are formulated employing offline parameters, i.e. growth rate, substrate uptake rate, oxygen transfer rate and stirring rate per unit volume. Metabolic heat generation is an online process variable portraying the instantaneous activity of any living organism and different types of calorimeters are employed to measure the exothermic heat in non-invasive way. RESULTS: In this present study an isothermal heat flux biocalorimeter (BioRC1) is employed to monitor the metabolic heat generated due to physiological activity of Pseudomonas aeruginosa cultivated in glucose-limited growth medium and attempts are made to obtain correlations between metabolic heat and significant process variables. CONCLUSIONS: The value of specific growth rate is determined from correlation developed based on online metabolic heat data and it is found to corroborate with literature value. This finding substantiates the application of calorimetric results to predict the biokinetics parameters for bacterial growth. (C) 2009 Society of Chemical Industry