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Synthesis of bioprocesses using physical properties data
Author(s) -
Steffens M. A.,
Fraga E. S.,
Bogle I. D. L.
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
biotechnology and bioengineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.136
H-Index - 189
eISSN - 1097-0290
pISSN - 0006-3592
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1097-0290(20000420)68:2<218::aid-bit11>3.0.co;2-f
Subject(s) - bioprocess , computer science , process (computing) , unit operation , exploit , software , biochemical engineering , range (aeronautics) , product (mathematics) , set (abstract data type) , process engineering , engineering , mathematics , programming language , chemical engineering , aerospace engineering , geometry , computer security
The aim of this article is to illustrate and evaluate a synthesis procedure which has been extended to tackle bioprocesses. Physical property information is used to screen candidate units thereby reducing the size of the synthesis problem. In this way, only units which exploit large property differences between components in a stream are selected. This is important for bioprocesses because of the large number of components and wide range of unit operations which are available. The screening technique and bioprocess‐unit‐design methodologies have been incorporated within an implicit enumeration algorithm which was developed for chemical process synthesis and is implemented in Java programming language. An important advantage is the ability of the bioprocess synthesis software to generate a ranked list of flowsheets which may subsequently be analyzed in more detail. Two case studies are used to evaluate the bioprocess‐synthesis technique. The first system involves a product which is secreted from the host organism. The second has significantly different characteristics in that the product is intracellular and forms inclusion bodies. The latter case study, in particular, is a large synthesis problem with 12 unit operations and 20 contaminant compounds. The results show that the synthesis methodology identifies a set of economically optimal flowsheets in a reasonable computational time which demonstrates its ability to deal with large synthesis problems. Using the synthesis methodology we can generate bioprocesses which are optimal in a system‐wide, rather than unit‐by‐unit, sense. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Biotechnol Bioeng 68: 218–230, 2000.