Agitation and air-sparging are necessary for providing oxygen and other nutrients to dense populations of cultured animal cells. Understanding the injury of fragile animal cells due to fluid-mechanical forces is an important issue to the culturing of these cells in bioreactors of various scales and for various applications. The Principal Investigator (PI) proposes to investigate the factors that effect the forces experienced by cells due to bubble break-up. Bubble-column and agitated bioreactors will be used to study the effect of operational parameters and medium composition on cell injury. Video microscopy will be employed to visualize and quantitate some aspects of cell to bubble interactions. The PI also proposes to investigate sparger and impeller designs that will allow the sparging and mixing of cells in bioreactors.
