SCALING UP EXERCISES- THE OBSESSION WITH HUGE FERMENTORS

Judging from the list of the most popular articles, the topics of scaling up and scaling down seems to be the most favoured among the readers. The only conclusions I can derived from such popularity is that either most readers do not know or the topics of scaling up or there is a lack of good books or courses on the topics.
In my opinion, not many practitioners are willing to share their experiences on scaling up and scaling down due to its huge practical importance in industrial fermentations. The understanding of scaling up and scaling down is derived more through trials and errors and earned the hardway that constitute valuable experience.
A brief perusal on the topic in biochemical engineering and biotechnology books are quite lightly covered. It is more a theoretical in approach and highlighting the importance of scale of size, volume magnitudes and sustaining in the constancy of values such as power, impeller speed and dissolved oxygen.
They never really teach you the right approach or the essential steps in doing scaling up. They are more obsessed with size and geometry of fermentors.
In reality the subject of scaling up is not straight and easy . There are many other factors specific to a particular fermentation studied. That is why you have to find your way in doing the scaling up. This can only be achieved if you have done extensive work on the fermentation process that will yield sufficient data to help plan the next step in the scaling up. These lab data are very useful in extrapolating the direction of your scaling up and determining the size and number of size increase you need to do
You cannot do scaling up just by dumping in fermentors of different size or with similar geometry.
That is why before you do scaling up, you need to know holistically the fermentation process in question. If you don’t do this approach it will just be a study in futility yielding data which are of no values in industrial fermentation


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