Application of computational fluid dynamics for simulation of stirred bioreactors in Ansys Fluent

Abstract

Stirred bioreactors are widely used in the pharmaceutical industry to produce various active substances for the treatment of cancer, heart and vascular diseases, viral and bacterial infections. Despite the widespread use of bioreactors with a stirrer, the optimization of mixing conditions remains an urgent task. In bioreactors of this type, continuous mixing of cells in a medium with a high rotation speed should be carried out. The manuscript considers an example of the use of computational fluid dynamics to study and model the process of cultivation Escherichia coli bacterial cells in a batch bioreactor (NLF, 30 l.). Computational fluid dynamics was used to analyze the hydrodynamic conditions in a bioreactor with a double Rushton turbine stirrer. To describe the movement of flows and evaluate turbulence in a batch bioreactor, the multiphase Euler model and the k-𝜀 turbulence model, respectively, were used, the built-in Ansys Fluent software package. A geometric model was built with the original dimensions of the bioreactor with an NLF 30 stirrer. Based on the geometric model, a computational grid was created for the working volume of the bioreactor and the optimal parameters for constructing the computational grid were selected. As a result of modeling the hydrodynamic regime, the distribution profiles of the turbulence kinetic energy over the volume of the bioreactor were obtained and the velocities of cell movement were found at different speeds of rotation of the stirrer. The obtained results show the possibility and applicability of the Ansys Fluent software package for calculating the hydrodynamic situation in a bioreactor with a stirrer at different stirring rates and at different cell volume fractions.