Bioprocess & Fermentation

Buying guide

Because this setup pulls from several categories at once, the price spread is wider than on any one of them. Listings run from EUR 0 to EUR 756.418. The low end is where consumables and single probes sit, a filter cartridge or a replacement sensor, and a bench-scale glass reactor costs a fraction of what a jacketed stainless vessel does. The figure at the top belongs to the vessel stage: a pilot-scale skid with its integrated control, agitation and sterilisation hardware is the single most expensive thing this work needs, and a continuous process centrifuge is not far behind. Pumps and standalone controllers fall in the middle, which is why a lab assembling a loop piece by piece often spends more on the reactor than on everything else combined.

Condition is the other axis. 91 percent of the listings are used. For a vessel or a centrifuge that figure is worth reading closely, since a stainless reactor that has already been through its depreciation can be sound for years more, and recertifying one is routine. For probes and filtration consumables the calculation differs, because those are wear items and a used sensor's remaining service life is harder to judge than a vessel's. Where a buyer has to weigh a used unit against a new one, the clearest difference is price, used and refurbished sit below new, and the specifics of any single unit, including whether a warranty applies, are arranged in consultation for that listing.

Types of Bioprocess & Fermentation

Bioprocess and fermentation equipment spans fermenters and bioreactors, process controls, pumps, centrifuges and filtration, and the categories carried here map onto the stages of a run rather than onto kinds of one machine. Scale-up fermentation runs as a sequence, from a controlled culture to a recovered product, and each stage leans on different hardware that constrains the stage after it. What follows walks that sequence.

Running the culture: fermenters and bioreactors

The vessel is where the work happens. A bioreactor holds a sterile volume at a set temperature while agitating the broth and feeding it oxygen, and the control loops that govern pH, dissolved oxygen and foam are what separate a reproducible run from a lost one. Stirred-tank designs dominate the listings, sized from bench units of a few litres up to pilot vessels, and the categories here carry both the vessels and the process controls that drive them. Glass bench reactors let an operator watch the culture; stainless steel takes over once a volume cannot be autoclaved as a unit and has to be sterilised in place.

The choice at this stage sets up everything downstream. A dense, high-cell-density culture is harder to separate and filter than a dilute one, so the vessel's yield and the broth it produces decide how much work the recovery train has to do.

Which pumps and controls does a run depend on?

A fermentation loop is only as stable as its feed and its sensing. Process pumps meter the feed, titrate acid and base to hold pH, and transfer broth between stages, and for anything touching the sterile volume a peristaltic action keeps the product off the pump internals. Process controls cover the probes and controllers that read dissolved oxygen, pH and temperature and act on them in real time. These two categories rarely stand alone: a controller is useless without a pump to execute its correction, and a pump runs blind without a probe telling it when.

Recovering the product: centrifugation and filtration

Once the run ends, the target has to come out of the broth. Centrifugation equipment separates cells from the medium by density, and at process scale that means continuous or high-capacity units rather than the benchtop machines a category page would describe. Where the product is secreted or where cells must stay intact, filtration takes over: tangential-flow and depth-filtration supplies clarify the broth and concentrate the target without the shear a spin imposes.

How do the two methods differ in practice? A centrifuge is fast and handles volume, but it stresses fragile cells and cannot sharply separate particles of similar density. Filtration is gentler and more selective, yet it fouls as the broth concentrates and slows as it goes. Many recovery trains use both, a coarse spin to remove the bulk of the biomass followed by filtration to polish, and the biotech and life sciences category carries the consumables that filtration consumes on every run.

Across the whole sequence, among the listings that specify a type, stirred-tank vessels and peristaltic pumps are the forms that recur most, which reflects where this market's volume actually sits.