What is Biochemical Engineering?

Biochemical engineering is a branch of chemical engineering or biological engineering that mainly deals with the design and construction of unit processes that involve biological organisms or molecules, such as bioreactors. Biochemical engineering is often taught as a supplementary option to chemical engineering or biological engineering due to the similarities in both the background subject curriculum and problem-solving techniques used by both professions. Its applications are used in the food, feed, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and water treatment industries.

The application of engineering principles to conceive, design, develop, operate, or use processes and products based on biological and biochemical phenomena. Biochemical engineering, a subset of chemical engineering, impacts a broad range of industries, including health care, agriculture, food, enzymes, chemicals, waste treatment, and energy. Historically, biochemical engineering has been distinguished from biomedical engineering by its emphasis on biochemistry and microbiology and by the lack of a health care focus. However, now there is increasing participation of biochemical engineers in the direct development of health care products. Biochemical engineering has been central to the development of the biotechnology industry, especially with the need to generate prospective products (often using genetically engineered microorganisms) on scales sufficient for testing, regulatory evaluation, and subsequent sale. Biotechnology

In the discipline's initial stages, biochemical engineers were chiefly concerned with optimizing the growth of microorganisms under aerobic conditions at scales of up to thousands of liters. While the scope of the discipline has expanded, this focus remains. Often the aim is the development of an economical process to maximize biomass production (and hence a particular chemical, biochemical, or protein), taking into consideration raw-material and other operating costs. The elemental constituents of biomass (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and to a lesser extent phosphorus, sulfur, mineral salts, and trace amounts of certain metals) are added to the biological reactor (often called a fermentor) and consumed by the bacteria as they reproduce and carry out metabolic processes. Sufficient amounts of oxygen (usually supplied as sterile air) are added to the fermentor in such a way as to promote its availability to the growing culture. View More