(218b) CFD Modelling and Matlab Analysis to Asses Mixing Performance in Custom Vessel Configurations in the Biopharmaceutical Industry

Title:

CFD Modelling and MatLab Analysis
to Assess Mixing Performance in Custom Vessel Configurations in the
Biopharmaceutical Industry

Abstract Text:

As
the biopharmaceutical industry moves towards single use bag systems which don’t
have conventional baffling, traditional scale-up equations are becoming less
applicable. Large variation is observed in power numbers of agitators at
different agitation speeds because of a vortexing impact
and the unique design of vessels. The bespoke nature of systems increases
difficulty of scaling and many companies have reduced the scale factor from lab
to pilot plant to final production scale in an effort to
overcome scaling issues.

Numerical
modelling, using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and MatLab
was applied to characterise a broad range of biopharmaceutical vessels from
upstream bioreactors and wave reactors, to downstream tangential flow
filtration vessels and holding vessels.  The
scales varied from 20 L to 3000 L. An accurate characterisation of the unique vessels
allowed the most appropriate scale-up strategy to be identified and tested in
CFD, reducing the number of validation batches required, during tech transfer
to plant.