Modelling across bioreactor scales: methods, challenges and limitations

Scale-up and scale-down of bioreactors are very important in industrial biotechnology, especially with the currently available knowledge on the occurrence of gradients in industrial-scale bioreactors. Moreover, it becomes increasingly appealing to model such industrial scale systems, considering that it is challenging and expensive to acquire experimental data of good quality that can be used for characterizing gradients occurring inside a large industrial scale bioreactor. But which model building methods are available? And how can one ensure that the parameters in such a model are properly estimated? And what are the limitations of different types of mod - els? This paper will provide examples of models that have been published in the literature for use across bioreactor scales, including computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and population balance models. Furthermore, the importance of good modeling practice will be highlighted as well.