Critical analysis of engineering aspects of shaken flask bioreactors

Abstract

Shaking bioreactors are the most frequently used reaction vessels in biotechnology. Since their inception, shaking bioreactors have been playing a significant role in medicine, agriculture, food, environmental, and industrial research. In spite of their huge practical importance, very little is known about the characteristic properties of shaken cultures from an engineering point of view. In this paper, a critical analysis is presented of the mixing characteristics, aeration, mass and heat transfer, power consumption, and suitability for on-line monitoring and control of various environmental and other operating parameters in aerated and anaerobic/anoxic conditions. Aspects of cell damage due to shear stress generated in shaken flask and loss of sterility due to contamination are also discussed.

Performance and characterization of a newly developed self-agitated anaerobic reactor with biological desulfurization

“…When a lower strength substrate than the one used in this study was used, our self-agitated reactor produced less biogas, resulting in a lower frequency of self-agitation. In addition, generally in the field of bioprocesses, mixing is regarded as a factor leading to failure when scaling-up of reactors (Suresh et al, 2009). In the case of our reactor, the scale-up could have an effect on the mixing condition because as stated above, the diameter of the U-tube affects the intensity of self-agitation.…”

The flow inside shaking flasks and its implication for mycelial cultures

“…Nevertheless, there is still limited understanding of the flow physics and lack of engineering studies for shaken vessels, which would be required to assure reproducible and meaningful scalingup to bioreactors (Suresh et al, 2009). In particular, the geometrical arrangement may play an important role on the quality of the mixing process in biotechnological applications.…”

“…Flasks are available in different sizes and materials, baffled, non-baffled and with other additions such as spring coils inserted at the bottom of the flask (Hopwood et al, 1985). These designs are used for different bioprocess development projects (Suresh et al, 2009), and therefore, many studies have been conducted on flasks since this shaking process was introduced into the biotechnology field at the beginning of the previous century. Different aspects of shaken Contents lists available at ScienceDirect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ces flasks have been investigated (Freedman, 1970;Büchs et al, 2000a, b;Hansen et al, 2011;Klöckner and Büchs, 2012); however, only few studies provide complete information of the inside flow.…”

A hydrodynamic description of the flow behavior in shaken flasks

“…Since the beginning of the century, shaking reactors have been used in many biotechnological processes [1,2]. For many years shaken flasks have been implemented in microbial fermentation, bacterial growth and in the pharmaceutical industry, among others [3][4][5].…”