PBS Biotech’s Air-Wheel™ Technology…
Harnessing the Buoyancy of Rising Gas Bubbles

PBS Biotech’s patented mixing mechanism and innovative product design generate maximum efficiency with minimal space requirements. When it comes to developing the world’s most advanced single-use bioreactor systems, PBS Biotech did not reinvent the wheel… we did however, improve upon the idea, and just happened to use a wheel of our own in the process.

 

Since oxygen is needed for cell culture growth PBS Biotech designed an Air-Wheel™ system to harness the buoyancy of rising gas bubbles and convert that energy into rotational power, resulting in rapid, homogeneous mixing and a high mass transfer rate with extremely low shear stress.

 

The Air-Wheel™ mixing mechanism produces low shear, permitting wide cell culture applications and scalability from 3 liter units used in the lab, to 80 liter units for pre clinical and clinical batches to 500 and 2500 liter units for cGMP production.

PBS Air-WheelTM Comparison


 

While the PBS Biotech bench-top (PBS 3) and tabletop (PBS 15) units provide cell culture growth and cell densities equal to stainless steel systems the Air-Wheel™ technology actually works more efficiently as the bioreactor volume increases. Watch our mixing video to view a demonstration of how rapidly complete mixing occurs with the PBS Biotech Air-Wheel™ system.

 


These three images created from a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of the PBS Biotech Air-Wheel mixing mechanism underscore the homogeneous mixing and low shear stress on surface and within the disposable vessel. Using Fluent CFD simulation software the University of Zurich Switzerland models shown here illustrate, at left, the liquid velocity vector field, at center, a shear stress level and kinetic energy distribution and at right a vector field.

 

PBS Biotech single-use bioreactors incorporate the latest hardware and software technology, applications, and toolkits to insure both high quality and high performance. Quality and redundancy are built into each system. PBS Biotech designs our bioreactors with advanced field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) and a very robust and advanced controller architecture. In addition, our bioreactor systems employ a real time operating system (RTOS) that powers over 500 million deployed devices including the most demanding aerospace, industrial and medical systems.

 

The PBS Biotech controller platform includes:

  • National Instruments (NI) sbRIO electronics suite
  • LabView software, an Intel™ Atom board and Wind River VxWorks RTOS.

The PBS Biotech design team selected LabVIEW, which is a powerful graphical programming environment, for developing the control system. LabVIEW represents parallelism and data flow allowing the bioreactors to be configured for each customer application and easily upgraded with new software releases.

 

PBS Biotech’s single-use bioreactors utilize fully-integrated high resolution touch-screen controls with network connectivity capability and remote connectivity for monitoring or management. Key features include:

  • TCP/IP, XML, OPC capable
  • Built-in data historian and remote control panel capability over Intranet
  • Each bioreactor has a dedicated IP address allowing secure remote connection via iPhone™, iPad™ or any smart phone or computing system
  • USB ports permitting connection with a keyboard, mouse, memory, and other computing devices

For product evaluation requests, application and engineering questions, and customer support, please contact us at: info@pbsbiotech.com or call: +1 (805) 482-7272