Fossil fuels have been the primary energy source for society since the Industrial Revolution. They provide the raw material for the manufacture of many everyday products that we take for granted, including pharmaceuticals, food and drink, materials, plastics and personal care. As the 21st century progresses we need solutions for the manufacture of chemicals that are smarter, more predictable and more sustainable. Industrial biotechnology is changing how we manufacture chemicals and materials, as well as providing us with a source of renewable energy. It is at the core of sustainable manufacturing processes and an attractive alternative to traditional manufacturing technologies to commercially advance and transform priority industrial sectors yielding more and more viable solutions for our environment in the form of new chemicals, new materials and bioenergy. This course will cover the key enabling technologies that underpin biotechnology research including enzyme discovery and engineering, systems and synthetic biology and biochemical and process engineering. Much of this material will be delivered through lectures to ensure that you have a solid foundation in these key areas. We will also consider the wider issues involved in sustainable manufacturing including responsible research innovation and bioethics. In the second part of the course we will look at how these technologies translate into real world applications which benefit society and impact our everyday lives. This will include input from our industry stakeholders and collaborators working in the pharmaceutical, chemicals and biofuels industries. By the end of this course you will be able to: 1. Understand enzymatic function and catalysis. 2. Explain the technologies and methodologies underpinning systems and synthetic biology. 3. Explain the diversity of synthetic biology application and discuss the different ethical and regulatory/governance challenges involved in this research. 4. Understand the principles and role of bioprocessing and biochemical engineering in industrial biotechnology. 5. Have an informed discussion of the key enabling technologies underpinning research in industrial biotechnology 6. Give examples of industrial biotechnology products and processes and their application in healthcare, agriculture, fine chemicals, energy and the environment.
Introduction to Biochemical and Bioprocess Engineering
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From the course by University of Manchester
Industrial Biotechnology
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From the lesson
Biochemical and Bioprocess Engineering
Biochemical and bioprocess engineering is concerned with the design of processes which involve biological transformations to manufacture a range of bio-based chemicals, biopharmaceuticals and biofuels. Through applying knowledge of process constraints, which are usually described mathematically, biochemical engineers are able to design a series of integrated process steps or “unit operations” which together make up a bioprocess.
This module will give an appreciation of the key role biochemical engineering has in translating discoveries coming from life sciences and synthetic biology, such as improved microbial platforms for product expression, into economically viable full scale production processes. Key engineering concepts and the problem solving approach required for the design of bioprocesses will be taught by a group of biochemical engineers from The University of Manchester, University College London and Technical University of Denmark.
Meet the Instructors
Prof. Nicholas TurnerDeputy Director
Manchester Institute of Biotechnology
Prof. Nigel ScruttonDirector
Manchester Institute of Biotechnology
Hello and welcome to week three of the Industrial Biotechnology MOOC,
Biochemical and Bioprocess Engineering.
This week, we're going to cover a general introduction to the background of
bioprocessing, biochemical engineering,
microbial fermentation and
bioreactor design, biocatalysis and enzymatic processes,
recovery of both large and small molecules, and
finally process economics and scale up.
So what is biochemical engineering?
Biochemical engineering is about taking biological molecular transformations
such as the transformation of glucose to ethanol by yeast.
And it's about taking that transformation and
designing a process around it at scale.
So by that, I mean rather than making test tube amounts of our product of interest,
ethanol in this case.
We can make tonne amounts of our product of interest.
And in order to design a successful biological process and
scale it up, we need to understand something about constraint management
as biochemical engineers.
So this means understanding the physical phenomena, the standards in codes,
the regulations that exist, in order to adhere to them.
It also involves understanding process design, process conditions, and
technology in order to design a plausible process.
One that's going to make us our product of interest, the right amount,
at the right quality, and at the right price.
If we take this on now and start thinking about processes and
systems, we can define what we mean by a process.
So process a is a collection of one or
more steps that's arranged in a sequence to carry out
the desired molecular transformation of our raw materials into our products.
So, for instance, it's about the processing steps required
to transform glucose into ethanol, using yeast as a biocatalyst.
Sometimes as chemical or
biochemical engineers, we refer to these various stages as unit operations.
So a unit operation is a part of a process that carries out a specific task or
has a specific function.
A system is a representation of a part or whole process which is chosen
sensibly in order for us to evaluate what we call material balances.
So material balances are the way we work out the material requirements of
a process.
As in how much ethanol do we produce for a given amount of glucose?
Or put another way, if I know my product market, for ethanol in this case,
is a certain number of tonnes per year.
How much glucose do I need in order to make that amount of ethanol?
Quite often, we define our system and call it a black box.
Because we're not always, in the first instance,
concerned with the detailed functioning of what happens in the system.
We're just interested in what goes in and what comes out.
The next level of detailed design
is very much concerned with what happens within the system as well.
So once we've calculated the material requirements of our bioreactor,
the next step is actually to do the detailed design of that reactor itself.
So how do we document and communicate process information?
As biochemical engineers, we do this using a process flow diagram, PFD,
or a flowsheet.
So, how to interpret a PFD, and what do they look like?
And how do we concisely present the relevant data, such as stream flow rates,
compositions, temperatures and pressures?
This is all vital information for
us as biochemical engineers to understand a process design.
And so what we do is we take the information and we put it on a flowsheet.
So here there's an example of a generic,
simplified process flow diagram for a batch fermentation process.
And if you take a moment to look at this, we can see that there's a flow.
So material moves from the sterilizer to the fermenter through the centrifuge
to a separation column, where we recover our products and our byproducts.
Now, if we take a moment to define some systems here,
and look at the different stages of the process.
First of all we see that there's some pre-treatment, or proprietary stages,
where we have growth medium.
That gets fed through a sterilizer and charged into our fermenter or bioreactor.
We also have our inoculum, so it's the cells,
in our example that we've been using here, it would be the yeast cells,
that we're going to put into the fermenter in order to transform the glucose in
the growth medium into ethanol, which is our product of interest.
That material gets charged, or loaded, into the fermenter and
that's where we carry out our biological transformation.
So the design of that fermenter is such that it enables the desired molecular
transformation to be carried out, i.e., it maximizes our yield of ethanol.
After the production stage, we move on to the final stage of this simple process,
which is what we call downstream separation.
So here, we're separating, or
recovering, the ethanol, which is our product (the thing we want to sell)
from the byproducts that we've produced during the process.
So as we move through the flowsheet we can see we have a strategy to transform
glucose, our raw material, into our ethanol, our product.
And we've got various unit operations in here, such as the bioreactor,
or the product separation column.
And we've got various systems that we can define as well.
So now I'd like to introduce you and
talk more about this concept of material balance.
And to understand this we're going to take something that we already know
how to do intuitively.
And give us a framework to actually do this material balance,
calculate the material requirements of a process in a much more rigorous way.
So the question is, how do you keep track of the number of people on a bus?
So if I'm Manchester City Council, we're interested in bus usage statistics
then I'm going to put you on the bus to Stockport.
And at the end of the day I want the statistics,
so I want to know how many people are on the bus after every stop.
There's a couple different strategies you could adopt here, and
one would be after every stop, to run around the bus and do a head count.
A more sensible strategy might be to sit at the front of the bus,
count the number of people that get on the bus at every stop.
So say five people get on the bus,
and at the same stop count the number of people that get off the bus.
So say three people get off the bus at this given stop.
From the difference between those two numbers, so five people on and
three people off, we know that there's two extra people on the bus.
What we're actually doing here, is we're doing a material balance on people.
So here our conserved quantity is people and our system is the bus.
So we're going to take this concept on now.
And you might realize that this is the same sort of concept that we apply
when we keep track of the amount of money we might have in a bank account.
The difference between our incomings and
our outgoings gives us the amount of money that's in that account.
So if we take this concept forward now and
define properly what a material balance is.
So we're saying a material balance is a balance of the conserved quantity for
a system.
So, the system is the entity over which we construct our balance, so
it was the bus in this case.
What do you mean by a conserved quantity?
So it's something that is unchanged by the system, and it's neither created nor
destroyed.
So when we talk about material balances,
the quantity we're really thinking about is mass.
And what do we mean by balance?
Well, balance is a mechanism through which we equate this conserved quantity.
So in the bus example, the bus was our system, our conserves quantity was people.
And we balance the number of people getting on with
the number of people getting off the bus.
So if we think about how we might formalize
that intuitive concept a little bit.
We can form something called the general material balance equation.
Which shows the difference between what enters the system through the system
boundaries, leaves the system through the system boundaries
is generated within the system, or consumed within the system, is equal to
the accumulation or the buildup within the system.
So in our bus example, input minus output equalled accumulation.
Five people got on the bus, three people got off, so our accumulation, or
the actual number of people on the bus, was two.
The generation and consumption terms come in when we have biological reaction.
So if we're trying to do a glucose balance on our bioreactor,
then we'd have a consumption term.
And if we were doing an ethanol balance, then we'd have a generation term,
because our product is generated, or made within the fermenter.
This is really a key learning point here, because to actually solve material
balance problems, this is the only equation that you need.
And quite often,
as we saw with the example with the bus, some of the terms can be eliminated.
So we can simplify this.
But this is always our starting point.
So, if we think a little bit now about types of processes.
This will allow us to actually think about how we might be able to simplify that
general material balance equation.
So we can say a process is at steady state,
if all process variables are constant with respect to time.
So, for example, that might mean things like mass flow rates,
pressure, composition.
So for every stream in a process,
all these things are constant with respect to time.
On the other hand, we also have transient processes which cover anything else.
So this is a process that's not at steady state.
Where process variables are not constant with respect to time.
And it's important not to confuse steady state with equilibrium.
So to finish off, I'd like to give another example of a material balance
to enable you to see how we apply this general material balance equation.
So in this example,
we're going to consider the population of Greater Manchester.
And we're going to say that every year 50,000 people
move into Greater Manchester, 70,000 people move out,
22,000 people are born, and 23,000 people die.
So the questions are: What is the system?
What is the conserved quantity?
And what is the balance over a year?
So we know that our system is the boundary of Greater Manchester.
Could get a map and look that up.
And our conserve quantity is people.
And again we have our general material balance equation.
In minus out plus generation minus consumption equals accumulation.
And here we can see that 50,000 people move into Manchester every year, so
that's the input into our system.
70,000 people move out of Greater Manchester every year, so
that's our output term.
There's 22,000 births, our generation term, so
generated inside our system boundary.
23,000 people die, that gives us a consumption term.
And that is equal to the accumulation.
And in this case you'll see that when we sum those numbers together,
we find that 21,000 people a year leave Greater Manchester.
So that's the significance there of the minus sign, because we've defined things
going into our system across the system boundary as positive.
So we can see that the population of greater Manchester is decreasing
by 21,000 people per year.
A little question to leave you with, which is,
can we draw other balances on this system?
So that's the end of this introductory unit.
The thing to realize here is that we've introduced flowsheets, the concept
of molecular transformation and constraint management, in order to design a process.
And I've really introduced you to the general concepts of material balances.
The next step is really to think about how we can apply these material balances to
describe processes and work out the material requirements of processes.
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