Análisis Crítico - Artículo 3

Development of a scale-up strategy for fermentative production of docosahexaenoic acid by

Schizochytrium sp.

TÓPICOS AVANZADOS EN BIOTECNOLOGÍA

11 de septiembre de 2018
Autor: Laura Johana Castellanos Suárez
 Análisis Crítico - Artículo 3
Development of a scale-up strategy for fermentative production of docosahexaenoic acid by
Schizochytrium sp.
Dong-Sheng Guo, Xiao-Jun Ji, Lu-Jing Ren, Gan-Lu Li, Xiao-Man Sun, Ke-Quan Chen, Song Gao, He
Huang
Chemical Engineering Science 176 (2018) 600–608

The paper developed a strategy based on computational fluid dynamics analysis and investigation of
microbial physiological properties to improve the efficiency of scale-up production of docosahexaenoic
acid (DHA). This fermentation and scale-up are still confronted with severe challenges due to the highly
viscous non-Newtonian characteristics of the culture broth and complex surroundings in the bioreactor.

The authors tested a 50 L and a 7000 L bioreactor system for the scale-up of DHA production based on
CFD and microbial physiological properties. The fermentation performance and flow field
characteristics of each bioreactor system were compared to provide rational knowledge of their mutual
relationship. Subsequently, six different impeller combinations were designed for the 7000 L
bioreactor, and subjected to simulations and contrastive analysis.

The CFD model described by Xia et al., 2009 was used to simulate the flow fields in the stirred tanks
with different impeller configurations. The multiple reference frames (MRF) method, Eulerian two-phase
model and Multiple Size Group model were used to simulate the gas-liquid flow in the stirred-tank
bioreactor. An unstructured hexahedral mesh and unstructured tetrahedral mesh was generated for
the region outside the rotor and the rotor region, respectively, using a commercial grid generation
software ICEMCFD-5.0, resulting in more than 15 million elements. The differential prediction
equations were numerically solved using a coupled multigrid solver based on a finite volume scheme
implemented in the CFD software ANSYS CFX 14.0. The simulation was judged as having converged
and reached the steady state when all residuals were less than 10-4 and the total gas hold-up in the
tank reached a constant level.

These results clearly indicated that process scale-up relying on a single parameter is not suitable for
DHA fermentations. In general, positive effects were reached of cultivation in the laboratory scale. In
Análisis Crítico - Artículo 3 | 11 de septiembre de 2018

contrast industrial-scale had many problems related to flow field environment and different factors.
Finally, the optimal strategy for industrial scale was de last impeller combination (E) and it was used to
scale-up the DHA fermentation; the biomass, DHA concentration, DHA percentage in biomass and DHA
productivity reached 128.3 g/L, 39.2 g/L, 30.5%, 326.5 mg/(L h), respectively and which exceeded the
results obtained on the lab-scale,

I really like the effort they did to scale up an industrial volume to evaluate the real behavior in the
environmental culture. Besides this results thus clearly indicate that the computational fluid dynamic
and analysis of physiological properties can help to understand important factors to take into account
in the industrial fermentation, especially of DHA fermentation. The paper was very clear about details in
the methodology development to allow other researchers to replay the strategy. Also, the simulation
figures were a very smart resource and you can figure out what were the changes and the effects of
different bioreactors configurations just by seeing the images. On the other hand, much of their results
about effects of cultivation in the laboratory versus industrial-scale bioreactors in fermentation were
expected and predictable from different authors in other scale up studies.