Posted: December 23rd, 2015

bioprocess engineering

Choose a bacterial or fungal cell line that produces a product of interest (the product may, for example, be the cells themselves or perhaps a protein produced by the cells). You should use scientific journal articles as the source of your information. Identify an appropriate production target for your product of interest (for example, you might want to produce a therapeutic protein that treats a disease X which has an incidence in Europe of Y people per year, and your company want to meet the demand; or you are producing an enzyme that is part of washing powder and the annual sales are Z, etc. etc). Note that you will incur a certain percentage loss at each unit operation of the DSP. 5 marks
Draw a labelled process flow diagram detailing a potential route for production and purification, including the upstream processes, bioreaction step and downstream unit operations. Ensure the background information to support your choice of processes is appropriately referenced. 5 marks
Specify (from your research) appropriate culture conditions such that you can write an equation of the form
mlkjihgzyxw NOHfCOeHdCONOcCHNObHaONOHC  222  
to describe the system. You should be able to specify the stoichiometric coefficients using experimental data found in the literature. 15 marks
Describe an appropriate bioreactor configuration for your system (e.g. batch, fed-batch, continuous, perfusion, according to the literature) and draw a process flow diagram for the bioreactor step. Ensure that you include and label all streams (both mass and energy). 5 marks
On these bases, you should be able to do a mass balance on the bioreactor step and specify all streams. Ensure that you state explicitly any assumptions you make. 25 marks
Design the heat exchanger equipment for your process, ensuring that you can meet the requirements of the energy balance on your system. Again, ensure that you state explicitly any assumptions that you make. 35 marks
As the process engineer, you are responsible for detailing to the utilities department all of the utilities required (e.g. clean air, cooling water flowrates etc.) 10 marks
Cooling water is available on-site at 10oC, and clean steam is available