Benchtop Bioreactor

Overview

A benchtop bioreactor is a controlled vessel for growing cells or microbes at process scale. Where a shake flask gives a culture warmth and motion, a bioreactor adds tight regulation of everything that matters: it holds pH against the acids the cells produce, keeps dissolved oxygen above the level they need, blends the feed gases, meters in nutrient and base, and mixes the broth so conditions are uniform top to bottom. It is the workhorse of fermentation development, recombinant protein production and cell-line scale-up, and the place a process is dialed in before it moves to a production tank.

The design is the classic stirred tank. A jacketed glass vessel holds the culture, a motor-driven impeller mixes it, gas bubbles up from a sparger, and a ring of probes reports the live state to a controller that closes a loop on each variable.

How it works

The culture lives in the Culture Vessel, a borosilicate cylinder closed by a multi-port Headplate whose O-ring-sealed ports admit every probe, gas line and feed. Mixing comes from the Agitation Drive drive: a top motor turns an impeller shaft through a reduction gear, dual Rushton turbines shear the gas into fine bubbles, and a mechanical seal keeps the rotating shaft penetration sterile.

Oxygen and pH are managed by gas and liquid. The Gas Mixing system blends air, oxygen, nitrogen and CO2 with mass-flow controllers and releases the mix through a sparger under the impeller; the Feed Pump Bank add acid, base, antifoam and nutrient feed under controller command. Temperature is held by the Temperature Control loop, a heating jacket warming the broth and a cooling valve carrying off metabolic heat.

The controller can only act on what it can measure, so the Probe Set track pH, dissolved oxygen, temperature and foam. All of it converges in the Control Tower, where a process controller runs the cascade loops, conditions the probe signals and logs the batch on a touchscreen.