Challenges for Bioreactor Design and Operation

As per definition, the bioreactor is the designed space where biological reactions take place. Hence, the bioreactor is essentially an engineering achievement and its design a challenge for bioengineers. The bioreactor should create a biosphere that as profoundly and adequately as possible provides the ideal environment for the biological reaction. The path for reaching, attaining, andmaintaining this is the main task for bioreactor engineers to find. That task decomposes into several endeavors necessary to accomplish. One is to design the physical entity of the bioreactor itself – by that, ensuring favorable physical conditions for transport of gases and liquids and solids over time. Another is to ensure that the physical entity of the bioreactor is favorably adapted to the biological system that performs the bioreactions. Yet another is to ensure that the dynamic biophysical and biochemical events taking place are operable in an industrial environment. In some of these design perspectives, bioreactor design is addressed at a process development stagewhere the performance of operations is independent of scale or biological system inside the bioreactor. Others address specific biological systems and the particular requirements of these. Others take the viewpoint at the holistic level: how to integrate the bioreactor and its design into an entire bioprocess with the constraints that this creates. Others concern provision of methodologies for observing the bioreactor at R&D as well as at operation stages in order to monitor and control and to optimize its performance from a variety of needs and purposes. Others provide better methods for supporting plant engineers and technicians to manage to operate the bioreactor processes under unpredictable industrial conditions where unexpected events, faults, and mishaps must be interpreted in short time and acted upon.