Description
The purpose of this book is to provide the reader with an introduction to systematic design principles and methodology when applied to biotechnology products. Certainly, none of these fields is new on the block – it is the combination of them that brings about a novel approach in this book. The theory of systematic design has almost entirely been devoted to mechanics and electronics, and the biotechnology field has had much of its roots in white biology and in (bio)chemical engineering.
Thus, we are dealing with a subject that lies on the border between biological technology and mechanical and electric engineering. The aim is to integrate important aspects of biological technology with mechanical and electric engineering. In writing a book of this type, there are two major ways of organizing the material, either from the perspective of mechanical design engineering or from the perspective of biotechnology.We have chosen the first for the simple reason that we have used mechatronics methodology from mechanical design engineering as a basis and applied it to biotechnology. When doing so, we have adapted the methodology to what we call a biomechatronics approach.
We presume the book will have mainly two categories of readers, those with a background in biotechnology and related areas and those with a background in mechanics and electronics.We have tried to keep most of the text on a level where both categories of readers would be able to understand the subject.
When this has not been possible, due to space constraints, we have instead provided rather detailed lists of reference literature.
We realize that a great deal of the biotechnical details in the application cases in Chapters 5–13 are probably rather difficult to understand for a person with a background in mechanics and/or electronics. You would need a thorough knowledge of biotechnology in order to comprehend everything in these chapters. However, the main ideas of how to utilize and work with the presented biomechatronic design methodology are possible to understand when reading these chapters. It is not necessary to understand all the biotechnological details in order to have great benefit from these chapters.
We have provided in the book nine application cases from a rather diverse collection of biotechnology products, such as biosensors, analytical instrumentations, production equipment for cell culturing, and protein purification. Some of the products could be characterized more as systems products rather than