Vitro Culture Bottle and Connection System

The client is a rapidly growing company providing products and services to the vaccine production and bioprocessing industries. The client was expanding operations and required a new design of in vitro culture bottle and manifold connection system. 

The task was to design a blow-moulded almost unbreakable bottle with a maximised internal surface area for cell attachment and proliferation. The client had a proprietary cap which they used on another system. A group of bottles would be connected by tubing to a central manifold which would allow for the harvesting of the cells from a single point. The product range would be used with biohazard materials and the seals and joints must be reliable and safe. 

The first task was to select a blow moulding grade that was tough and after use would incinerate cleanly without harmful combustion products or which could be recycled after appropriate decontamination precautions. The bottle design was evolved from an existing client design with corrugated sides and a sump feature added. The corrugated sides increase the internal surface area x2.5. 

The bottle was designed for straightforward open and shut blow moulding tooling. The components were finalised and CAD data issued. The manifold was designed within the capacity of a specific size range of injection moulding machines to achieve the side action travel required to core out the manifold. The components were finalised and the CAD data was issued.