Sustained operation of nutrient mist reactor to grow hairy roots

Abstract

This paper presents feasible range of feed concentration and flow rate for sustained operation of nutrient mist reactor (NMR) in continuous mist feed mode for growing hairy roots. Sustained operation of NMR requires liquid holdup in the root bed that does not exceed a critical value and the nutrient concentration in the bed is maintained above a critical value. This ensures that the growing root mass gets adequate supply of both liquid and gas phase nutrients. These bounds on liquid holdup and concentration can be translated to bounds on the feed flow rate and concentration through mass balance over the root bed and numerical simulations. This approach maintains the reactor performance for a continuous mist-on cycle and does away with the uncertainty in choosing intermittent mist-on/mist-off cycles. It is expected that this paper will be of immense help in the rapidly growing NMR technology to grow hairy roots. 