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Abstract

A wide variety of biologicals are being manufactured today through a fermentation process, chemical synthesis or derived from natural products. One of the challenges in the manufacturing of commercial products is the recovery, isolation and purification of the target product from a multi-component mixture. Chromatography has been the method of choice for the separation of complex biological mixtures for the last fifty years. Recently, the Simulated Moving Bed (SMB) technique has become the mainstay of preparative separation allowing to achieve a higher productivity and reduce the solvent consumption in comparison to batch chromatography. The SMB process realizes the separation of a feed mixture into two fractions by exploiting a simulated countercurrent contact of the solid and the fluid phase, basing on difference between adsorption affinities of the components on the solid phase. A major drawback of conventional SMB chromatography is the inability to produce a pure product stream if the desired component is neither the strongest nor the weakest adsorbable one. Therefore, several concepts have been proposed to achieve this goal through various modifications of SMB systems. In the work to be presented a purification of a target component out of a multi-component mixture (which is considered in a simplified manner as a quasi-ternary mixture) using advanced SMB technology is investigated. Theoretical analysis includes detailed study of several different SMB configurations capable to purify and produce the component with intermediate adsorption strength. Analyzed are two coupled SMB units connected either via raffinate or extract port both operated with individual switching times, and integrated 8-zone SMB units with internal recycle of raffinate/extract stream. Separation performance of these configurations at optimal conditions is subsequently compared to commercially used pseudo-SMB process (JO process). To validate obtained results, recently developed in our laboratory pilot scale SMB system, capable to perform quasi-ternary separations will be introduced. Actual status of the experimental realization of investigated separation problem will be presented.