Cardiovascular disease is one of the leading cause of mortality in the US and especially, coronary artery disease increases with an aging population and increasing obesity. Currently, bypass surgery using autologous vessels, allografts, and synthetic grafts are known as a commonly used for arterial substitutes. However, these grafts have limited applications when an inner diameter of arteries i...

A microfluidic bioreactor for cell co-culture has been developed to study the cytotoxicity of xenobiotics in multiorgan interaction models. In this paper, we investigate the drug metabolism of ifosfamide, an anticancer drug, in liver and its impact on kidney. HepG2/C3A (liver) and MDCK (kidney) cells are cultured in two separate PDMS chambers connected by a perfusion loop mimicking blood flow. ...

Twenty years of Italian outdoor investigations on closed photobioreactors are discussed in this review. Many photobioreactor designs have been projected; some have been built, tested and patented. The Italian research approach from tubular (single tube and traditional loop) to flat and column and again to tubular photobioreactors (coil and loops) has improved microalgal yield. It increased from...

Background Current in vitro and animal tests for drug development are failing to emulate the organ complexity of the human body and, therefore, to accurately predict drug toxicity. In this study, we present a self-contained, bioreactor based human in vitro tissue culture test system aiming to support predictive substance testing at relevant throughput. We designed a microcirculation system inte...

Growing hairy roots in bioreactors has proven challenging. Here we summarize the recent work using a novel bioreactor, the mist reactor, for the culture of hairy roots from many plant species. Compared to most liquid-phase bioreactors, this gasphase bioreactor offers a completely different environment for growing roots. Design, modeling, and some of the unique engineering aspects inherent to mi...

The mathematical model of the integrated process of mercury contaminated wastewater bioremediation in a fixed-bed industrial bioreactor is presented. An activated carbon packing in the bioreactor plays the role of an adsorbent for ionic mercury and at the same time of a carrier material for immobilization of mercury-reducing bacteria. The model includes three basic stages of the bioremediation ...

Experimental and numerical studies of the fluid dynamics of thin liquid film wall protection systems have been conducted in support of the ARIES-IFE study. Both the porous “wetted wall” concept, involving low-speed injection through a porous wall normal to the surface, and the “forced film” concept, involving high-speed injection through slots tangential to the surface, have been examined. Thes...

In this work the Computational Fluid Dynamics simulation of a stirred bioreactor purposely designed for the production of hydrogen from organic wastes fermentation is presented. The bioreactor is a vortex-ingesting, dual impeller, mechanically-agitated vessel equipped with a central draft tube. Due to the geometrical and physical complexity, the selected reactor offers a very challenging benchm...