Packed bed Bioreactor

Supervisor Professor: Dr.Rashedi

Alireza Mehrdadfar
Packed Bed Bioreactor

▪ Packed bed or fixed bed bioreactors are commonly used with

attached biofilms especially in wastewater engineering.

▪ The use of packed bed reactors gained importance after the potential
of whole cell immobilization technique has been demonstrated.

▪ The immobilized biocatalyst is packed in the column and fed with

nutrients either from top or from bottom.
Packed Bed Bioreactor

▪ One of the disadvantages of packed beds is the changed flow

characteristic due to alterations in the bed porosity during operation.

▪ While working with soft gels like alginates, carrageenan etc. the bed
compaction which generally occurs during fermentation results in
high pressure drop across the bed.
Packed Bed Bioreactor

▪ The rate of mass transfer between the cells and the medium depends on the flow
rate and on the thickness of the biomass film on or near the surface of the solid
particles.

▪ Packed bed reactors often suffer from problems caused by poor mass transfer
rates and clogging. Despite this they are used commercially with enzymatically
catalysts and with slowly or non-growing cells.

▪ They are also used in the anaerobic treatment of high strength wastewaters (eg.
food processing wastes). Large plastic blocks are used as solid supports for the
cells. These blocks have a large surface area for cell immobilization and when
packed in the reactor are difficult to clog.
 Packed Bed Bioreactor

Schematic of Packed bed Reactor

Packed Bed Bioreactor

▪ Though packed beds belong to the class of plug flow reactors in

which back-mixing is absent in many of the packed beds slight
amount of back-mixing occursfor
PBR development which changes
bioprocess the characteristics of
applications
fermentation.

▪ Packed beds are generally used where substrate inhibition governs

the rate of reaction.
Packed Bed Bioreactor

▪ The packed bed reactors are widely used with immobilized cells.

▪ Several modifications such as tapered beds to reduce the pressure

drop across the length of the reactor, inclined bed, horizontal bed,
rotary horizontal reactors have been tried with limited success.
Packing material
PBR development for bioprocess applications

▪ The first application of PBRs in bioprocessing was the production of

foot-and-mouth disease virus using BHK cells grown
PBR development for bioprocess applications

▪ Bioreactor manufacturers have developed commercial PBRs that can

accommodate many different types of carriers. Most of these PBRs
are of the internal configuration.
Title and Content Layout with Chart
Limitations and prospects for improved
PBRs for bioprocess applications

▪ Assessing a maximal potentially attainable performance for PBRs requires a

knowledge of the maximum cell density that can be attained in the bed and
the maximum size that a PBR can be scaled-up to.
Limitations and prospects for improved
PBRs for bioprocess applications

▪ The depth of the bed (hpbr) depends on the superficial fluid velocity (U0)
through it, the cell density XPBR and the specific oxygen consumption rate
(qO2), as follows
PBRs as bio artificial organs and tissues

▪ The use of PBRs in biomedical applications began in the 1990s.

Mainly, the focus has been in using PBRs to culture immobilized
hepatocytes as a bio artificial liver device (BAL).

▪ As for bioprocess applications, the initial attempts to culture

hepatocytes in PBRs were made using non-porous glass beads as the
packing material. The first such PBR consisted of a 30 ml packed-bed
BAL with glass beads of 1.5 mm in diameter.
The End