Bioprocessing Equipment

Equal Access to Unequaled Technology

CNAM-Bio provides access to critical pilot scale-up equipment and expertise, opening the doors to limitless possibilities in bio-derived polymer and chemical innovations. Let’s turn your ideas into solutions that will change the lives of millions around the world.

CNAM-Bio infrastructural resources include capabilities to progress from isolation of unique extremophilic microbes, to laboratory scale experiments, to high volume and pilot-scale production of biopolymers and biochemicals.‍

For the isolation of novel microbes, the center takes advantage of various regional locations, including the exceptional microbial biodiversity at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF). In biocatalysis and metabolic engineering, the center utilizes a full range of laboratory equipment housed in SD Mines’ Chemical and Biological Engineering Department.  For bioprocessing scale-up, the CNAM-Bio Bioprocessing Facility comprises 40 liter and 260 liter bioreactors, allowing stepwise scale-up from benchtop bioreactors to pilot level production, together with downstream extraction and purification systems.

Capable of producing biopolymers and polymer precursor chemicals in kilogram quantities, this equipment can provide sufficient material for pilot-scale polymer processing studies at the SD Mines’ Composites and Polymer Engineering Laboratory (CAPE Lab), where the CNAM-Bio Bioprocessing Facility is housed. The CAPE Lab is a dedicated polymer/composites research facility, available to CNAM-Bio’s researchers, which possesses an exceptional range of polymer processing, composite manufacturing and materials testing equipment. CNAM-Bio also draws on the advanced characterization resources of the university’s EMES facility, and cutting-edge imaging techniques (including a Lattice Light Sheet Microscope and Photo-Activated Localization Microscopy) in SD Mines’ Nanoscience and Biomedical Engineering department.