Taylor-Couette Devices for Bioreactor Applications

Abstract

With research and development for almost one century, the Taylor-Couette device is now applied in many practical applications such as reaction, filtration, extraction and bioreactor. We intend to use the Taylor-Couette bioreactor to culture cells that are seeded in a biodegradable porous scaffold. Therefore, the behavior of light porous particle, oxygen transport and cell proliferation was measured in this study. The production yield of PEX protein, from QM7 cells transfected with pM9PEX, was quantified and the results showed a much higher PEX mass per scaffold for bioreactor than the control. As such, there is potential for the use of Taylor-Couette bioreactor in the mass production of PEX protein. Besides the application as bioreactor, the interesting phenomenon of droplet behavior was observed. The study can help to better understand the droplet behaviors in a Taylor vortex and therefore benefit certain applications like liquid-liquid extraction conducted in Taylor vortex devices.