Air Bubbler questions

Hi all! My experiments require aeration and I was wondering if you might be able to answer a couple of questions about the Air Bubbler plug-in before I’ll purchase a few Pioreactors.

  1. What airbubbler / air pump would you recommend to be connected? what is the minimum and maximum airflow that it can support? I am looking for 0.2-0.3 VVM (roughly 3-4.5 mL of air per minute)
  2. Is there an option for ramping up aeration based on a signal?
  3. Does anyone have information about the oxygen transfer rate possible in the pioreactor?

Thank you!!

Hi @lavik17, thanks for your questions

  1. The air pumps that we test with are very simple: 4V to 12V DC air pumps, They look like this, but you don’t need to buy that one. You should be able to find DC air pumps for > $10 USD. Most of these pumps will move more air than you need, so you can either introduce an inline valve to slow it, or reduce the DC% (which reduce the power provided to the pump).
  2. Yup, this is possible. The plugin exposes it’s DC% as a parameter that can be adjusted by other jobs.
  3. By default, the OTR is so-so in the Pioreactor. There are some changes you can make to improve it: introducing an air pump is one of them, and faster mixing RPM is another. I don’t have any numbers to share unfortunately.

Thank you! This is very useful to know!