User:Fabbim/sandbox/Bioreactor Scheduling

Overview
Understanding bioreactor timelines is imperative for plant design. The length of a culturing process can influence decisions in a product plant such as volume and quantity of bioreactors to meet an organization’s specifications for product output.

Established timelines assist in understanding efficiency of different types of culturing. For example, a continuous bioreactor could output a much higher product concentration than a fed-batch bioreactor for E. Coli. However, understanding of continuous cultivation time would reveal that this product concentration would be produced over a 3 month period as opposed to a 7-day period, leading to a much larger product concentration per time in a fed-batch system, which is economically favorable.

A complete bioreactor process is a combination of all of its various stages. For all cell types, this includes a minimum of inoculation and cultivation times, setup and cleaning time, sterilization time, and harvest time. Other process steps, such as heat exchanging, stage-specific feeding (such as fed-batch vs. batch) or perfusion are introduced to the timeline based on the types of cells used and the intended product.

Setup and cleaning stages are important for tank filling, emptying, and cleaning to prevent cross-contamination between different organisms in separate processes as well as fouling on bioreactor walls.

The cultivation stage allows cells to multiply and grow to the density that allows for efficient conversion of substrate to desired industrial product.