Model-based control of a high pressure homogenizer

An optimal control methodology for the homogenization of bacterial cells to recover intracellular products is presented in this work. A computational fluid dynamics model is used to quantify the hydrodynamic forces present in the homogenizer and empirical models are used to relate these forces to experimentally obtained cell disruption and product recovery data. We illustrate this methodology with an E. Coli bacterial system used to produce DNA plasmids. Homogenization is performed using an industrial APV-Gaulin high pressure homogenizer.