ABSTRACT
The engineering design staff has as its focus the establishment of a highly accurate investment estimate and the creation of controls to insure project completion within preestablished economic constraints. Since the heart of a fermentation facility is the bioreactor, a significant design emphasis is needed. Air supplied to the fermentor must not only be liquid and oil free, but must be sterile. In general, all the stages which follow the fermentation stage—starting with the harvest tank—are combined to be called “downstream processing”. One effective technique, often overlooked, is activity within the fermentor or harvest tank to simplify subsequent operations and effect cost savings. Another consideration not often evaluated early in development concerns economic balance between product accumulation rate and extraction operations. Cell separation is performed often whether the product is intracellular or extracellular. The fixed capital investment is regarded as the capital required to provide all the depreciable facilities for required production.
