Within the last few years, disposable centrifuge technologies have been introduced that provide a fully disposable option for cell removal or harvest clarification. For example, the kSep400® is a Fluidized Bed Centrifuge (FBC), designed by kSep Systems, that is being used for biopharmaceutical applications. The unit can be used in harvest clarification mode to remove cells or particles from a suspension and keep the centrate as the product, or in concentrate-wash-harvest mode to collect and concentrate a cell product, discard the centrate, and wash the cell suspension to remove process-related impurities. The latter application is something the traditional disk stack centrifuges could not do since recovery of a highly viable cell product was difficult. The kSep400® system effectively captures mammalian cells under a range of operating (RPM and flowrate) conditions, however it has not been as effective in retaining smaller (2-5 micron) process impurities. Moreover, theoretical equations based on the equating of the centrifugal and inertial forces on particles have shown limited agreement with experimental results, which makes scaleup of the Ksep a risky and unpredictable venture. The working equations for predicting particle retention recommended by kSep Systems LLC assume plug flow and no particle-particle interaction in the chamber. In this study, alternative modeling approaches have been pursued that include the use of the Richardson-Zaki equation to account for particle-particle interactions and the use of a two-phase Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model to account for the Coriolis force. The predictions from these models will be compared to experimental results with a kSep400® system.

Understanding and modeling retention of mammalian cells in a fluidized bed centrifuge

249th National Meeting (2015)

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