(250a) Systematic Process Development of Simulated Moving Bed Chromatography

Chromatographic separation is widely used in the pharmaceutical industry. It is considered one of the most powerful separation technique, since a slight difference in affinity to the packing material is often sufficient, and suitable for thermally sensitive compounds. However, since it is a batch process, the productivity of a chromatographic process is often low. Furthermore, the high consumption of solvent (desorbent) often requires a significant amount of evaporation cost. To overcome these drawbacks, simulated moving bed (SMB) processes have been developed originally in the petrochemical industry, and applied widely in the pharmaceutical industry in the past decade. In particular, one of the notable application of SMBs is enantiomer separation. However, designing SMB processes requires determining many design and operating parameters, which often requires computational investigations.

In this work, a systematic method to design SMB processes is discussed. A rigorous mathematical model is developed from experimental data using a small-scale equipment. After obtaining this model, advanced mathematical programming techniques are applied to find the optimal design and operating parameters for efficient separation. This systematic method of process development can be extended to novel operating schemes. Furthermore, an ongoing study on integration of chromatographic separation with crystallization is presented.