Review of Computational fluid dynamics applications in biotechnology processes

Abstract

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is well established as a tool of choice for solving problems that involve one or more of the following phenomena: flow of fluids, heat transfer,mass transfer, and chemical reaction. Unit operations that are commonly utilized in biotechnology processes are often complex and as such would greatly benefit from application of CFD. The thirst for deeper process and product understanding that has arisen out of initiatives such as quality by design provides further impetus toward usefulness of CFD for problems that may otherwise require extensive experimentation. Not surprisingly, there has been increasing interest in applying CFD toward a variety of applications in biotechnology processing in the last decade. In this article, we will review applications in the major unit operations involved with processing of biotechnology products. These include fermentation,centrifugation, chromatography, ultrafiltration, microfiltration, and freeze drying. We feel that the future applications of CFD in biotechnology processing will focus on establishing CFD as a tool of choice for providing process understanding that can be then used to guide more efficient and effective experimentation. This article puts special emphasis on the work done in the last 10 years.

Application of Mechanistic Models for Process Design and Development of Biologic Drug Products

“…This type of flow is not too different compared to the filtration through small pores with the fluid flowing along the surface of the membrane such as in UF-DF operations [58]. Schausberger et al [59] have tried to examine if predictive simulation of fluid flow (flux decline and membrane fouling) in cross-flow membrane setup was feasible and if the developed mathematical models could serve as design tool for practical process design applications in the future.…”

6.3 Industrial Cell Culture Process Scale-up Strategies and Considerations

“…A few good review papers about CFD applications in this area have been published [87,88]. In general, CFD simulation consists of mesh constructions, boundary definition, solving various governing equations for momentum, mass, and energy balance, and data analysis.…”

Advances and Practices of Bioprocess Scale-up

“…Following the multi-scale analysis method describing real-time physiology of cells, a huge amount of efforts have been taken to understand flow field of fermentation system. CFD has been established as a very useful tool in solving serial problems such as flow of fluid, mixing, transfer, and chemical reactions [45,46]. CFD technology follows the fundamentals where the conservation of fluid mass, momentum, and energy are governed, and it has been used to find out the bottleneck involved in industrial scale-up.…”