Design and Simulation of a Continuous Bioreactor

This research investigates a novel continuous bioreactor with significant improvement in gas-liquid and medium mixing.  This bioreactor has dramatic advantages in cell cultivation because of the high cell survival rate, enhanced growth rate, and overall high productivity.  The bioreactor consists of an outer shell cylinder and inner core cylinder, each with adjustable rotational velocities to control the mixing in the reactor.  Inlet flows are controlled to provide additional medium and oxygen to the reactor volume. 

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were performed to determine the range of flow patterns possible in this bioreactor.  Steady state operation was assumed in order to reduce the time for convergence.  Simulations are conducted for multiphase fluids with various operating conditions in order to simulate the actual reaction environment in the bioreactor.  Suitable rotational velocity and optimized bioreactor size was obtained from simulation results analysis.  Based on the optimized parameters from simulation, experiments were conducted for selected operating conditions.