LEE565C - Supply of 2 x Airlift Bioreactor Platform for University of Dublin

Tender description

University College Dublin wish to purchase a double air-lift bioreactor system (composed by two identical units) as a part of the SFI funded BEACON Bioeconomy Research Centre. The remit of this Centre is to develop sustainable novel processes and products using biobased resources, creating clusters for new industry partnerships and delivering the expertise and trained workforce to translate new technologies into new sustainable products, processes, markets and industries. The air-lift bioreactor system must allow for continuous culture of fungal biomass with a suitable flow-rate addition of culture media but also should allow refrigerated biomass harvesting as well as scalable design of experiments. The system planned for fungal biomass cultivation must be easily interchangeable between eucaryotic and procaryotic cell cultures. The system must be able to run as integrated and/or individual set of bioreactors with individual setpoints (e.g. Temp., pH etc.). Standard control over temperature, pH and dissolved oxygen is essential with additional exhaust gas analysis capability with automatic individual online oxygen transfer rates (OTR), carbon dioxide transfer rate (CTR) and respiratory quotient (RQ) calculations to be used for process driven decisions. Optimal air sparger design to minimize cells shear stress, guarantee optimal oxygen mass transfer and media recirculation is mandatory. These capabilities must allow researchers to perform design of experiments to facilitate scouting for process scale up.