Team:Manchester/Model/Continuous Culture
Continuous Culture of Bacteria
Introduction
In an attempt to envision scaling up our project in an industrial scale, we are modelling the mathematical and theoretical background of continuous culture. Our aim is to determine the maximum output of bacteria production per unit of time which would allow us to estimate production cost and determine the profitability cost of our project.
We envision our bacteria to be cultured in a chemostat for production. A chemostat is a bioreactor in which fresh medium is continually added while culture liquid containing leftover nutrients, microorganisms, and metabolic products are continuously removed at the same rate. This technique is called continuous culture and allows microbial growth to take place under steady-state conditions - growth that occurs at a constant rate and in a constant environment. Unlike a batch culture method where bacterial cells undergo the full bacterial cell cycle, a continuous culture keeps the bacteria growing on its exponential phase of the bacterial cell cycle, thus a continuous supply of bacteria can be produced.
Background Theory
Variables - Kinetics of Bacterial Growth
1. The growth of bacteria in its exponential phase can be represented in the following exponential growth equation:
\begin{equation} \frac{1}{x} \frac{dx}{dt} = \mu = \frac{log_e 2}{t_d} \end{equation} where:
\begin{equation*} x{equation*} is the bacteria concentration (dry weight mass/unit volume) at time
