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Abstract

Increasing application of chromatographic separations in the petrochemical, pharmaceutical, bio-chemical and food industries motivates efforts to improve the process performance by designing efficient techniques of the process realization. The development of sophisticated multicolumn chromatographic systems such as SMB allows continuous operation in an industrial scale. However, for separating of complex multicomponent mixtures simple batch elution using several columns arranged in parallel and/or in series can be considered as an alternative option [1].
In this work chromatographic separation of a ternary mixture has been examined. The second eluting component has been considered as target product. Such a difficult separation requires complicated SMB arrangements [2]. As an alternative solution different batch configurations of identical chromatographic columns can be considered: parallel and series arrangements and series-parallel configurations. Optimal column arrangements with respect to process productivity have been determined and compared to SMB configurations, e.g., two SMB units connected sequentially or eight-zone SMB. For evaluation and optimization of multicolumn systems an adequate mathematical model of the process dynamic has been coupled with a random search optimization procedure.

[1] G. Ziomek, D. Antos, L. Tobiska, A. Seidel-Morgenstern, 2005, Submitted to J. Chromatogr. A
[2] A. Nicolaos, L. Muhr, P. Gotteland, R. M. Nicoud, M. Bailly J. Chromatogr. A 908 (2001) 71-86.