Electrical design of electroporation reactors

Electroporation, i.e. the treatment of biological cells by an electric field, is currently being introduced by industry in order to improve their production processes for food. Due to the variety of applications different electroporation reactors have been designed, most of them tailored for a specific application. Based on the design of some selected devices the paper describes the steps of the electrical design of an electroporation reactor. It starts with experiments in small scale in order to find out the required electric field strength and pulse shape. As a constraint due to requirements for the material and transport some devices have an inhomogeneous field distribution. But more advantageous is a substantially homogeneous field which usually is achieved either by a collinear design or an arrangement of parallel plate electrodes. In the paper both designs are compared to each other. For both geometries a method for easy scaling is presented enabling a fast adaptation of an existing design to the required size and throughput.