Year: 2018-19

Company: Boehringer Ingelheim

Liaison(s): Samet Yildirim, Marcella Yu

Boehringer Ingelheim (BI) is a privately owned pharmaceutical company that was established in 1885. BI is a contract manufacturing organization (CMO) but also develops new biological products and biosimilars. The company has fully integrated process development and manufacturing facilities located in Biberach, Germany; Fremont, California; Vienna, Austria; and Shanghai, China. The BI network has over 150 biologics projects and 22 commercial products, where the facilities are able to handle over 200,000 liters of product at a given time. The extensive process development of BI necessitated a better understanding of the way their bioreactors work, which led to BI’s partnership with KGI to study the behaviors of bioreactors in different process scales.

The goal of this Team Master’s Project is to establish bioreactor characteristics and understand the impact of equipment differences for tech transfer between sites and customers. Single-phase and multiphase simulations are performed at various scales of bioreactors (2L, 100L, and 12kL) to examine gas transfer and impeller location effects and compare the simulated data to experimental data.