No abstract

Industrial fermentation processes are increasingly popular, and are considered an important technological asset for reducing our dependence on chemicals and products produced from fossil fuels. However, despite their increasing popularity, fermentation processes have not yet reached the same maturity as traditional chemical processes, particularly when it comes to using engineering tools such as mathematical models and optimization techniques. This perspective starts with a brief overview of these engineering tools. However, the main focus is on a description of some of the most important engineering challenges: scaling up and scaling down fermentation processes, the influence of morphology on broth rheology and mass transfer, and establishing novel sensors to measure and control insightful process parameters. The greatest emphasis is on the challenges posed by filamentous fungi, because of their wide applications as cell factories and therefore their relevance in a White Biotechnology context. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is introduced as a promising tool that can be used to support the scaling up and scaling down of bioreactors, and for studying mixing and the potential occurrence of gradients in a tank.

No abstract

A rotating bed reactor (RBR) has been modeled using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The flow pattern in the RBR was investigated and the flow through the porous material in it was quantified. A simplified geometry representing the more complex RBR geometry was introduced and the simplified model was able to reproduce the main characteristics of the flow. Alternating reactor shapes were investigated, and it was concluded that the use of baffles has a very large impact on the flows through the porous material. The simulations suggested, therefore, that even faster reaction rates could be achieved by making the baffles deeper. Two-phase simulations were performed, which managed to reproduce the deflection of the gas–liquid interface in an unbaffled system. A chemical reaction was implemented in the model, describing the ion-exchange phenomena in the porous material using four different Sherwood number correlations. The simulations were overall in good agreement with experimental data.

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