Blog 4: Time to Knuckle Down

Blog 4: Time to Knuckle Down

Now that my group and I have had time to sit down and discuss our idea in full, we decided to put a bit more thought into the bioprocessing process and do a hell of a lot of research and our Kefir Water idea is now in the pipeline behind the blogging scenes.

To start this weeks class we began by discussing different types of bioprocessing processes. We had previously studied these in Micro modules so I had a decent enough understanding of them and just enough knowledge of them to contribute a little in the class. These processes were batch, fed-batch and lastly continious.

The class then went on to discuss the different components of a typical bioreactor. Shane, my group member for the group project, had done his industrial work placemnet in a brewery and knew a lot about bioreactors so was a good person to have within our little Kefir orientated team. When Barry asked us did we know any of the parts and functions of the bioreactor, he was able to whistle off the vast majority of them. This filled me with confidence in terms of doing the project as I knew working with him every week would develop my understanding of bioprocessing that is obviously essential to this module.

For the second class on that Friday, we presented our ideas to the class and showed our classmates how these ideas that we’ve came up with in the last few weeks would aid the bioprocessing industry. Most of my Food Innovation classmates had some very good ideas that I was very impressed with and knew a nice bit about. We are also in that module with the pharmaceutical class and their ideas were very different to the food orientated ones. It was nice to see how the two classes compare when they are asked do the same project given that we were pratically in the same modules for the whole of first and second year. So in my opinion this mini presention was good to view these perspectives and would recommend all lectures to do this when doing a project where there’s a number of different courses in the one class.

What we had to do for next week was to start creating an eportfolio online which is basically a website. This would help us document our progress throughout the weeks and then help us teach the class on our concept towards the end of the semester which I’m sure will be mentioned in a later blog.

Anyway, that’s all for this week,

Bye now,

Sean.