Theoretical and experimental study of the effects of scale-up on mixing time for a stirred-tank bioreactor

Abstract

Mixing time is one of the criteria most widely used to characterize mixing intensity in bioprocesses. In bioreactors, mixing mainly depends on amount of energy consumed, reactor and stirrer shapes, airing speed and the rheology of the medium. In this work we experimentally determined the mixing times for a lab-scale bioreactor equipped with a stirrer propelled by two Rushton turbines. From these experiments we could obtain expressions to evaluate the effects of stirring speed, superficial gas velocity, specific power consumption and system geometry on mixing times under various flow regimes. The resulting correlations were employed to analyze the effect of scale-up on mixing times for the production of Staphylococcus aureus Smith.