Design of simulated moving bed for separation of fumaric acid with a fronting phenomenon

Abstract

The production of fumaric acid through a biotechnological pathway has grown in importance because of its potential value in related industries. This has sparked an increasing interest in developing an economically-efficient process for the separation of fumaric acid (product of interest) from acetic acid (by-product). To address this issue, we attempted to develop a highly efficient chromatographic process that could be well tailored to continuous separation of fumaric acid from by-product. This study aimed to develop a simulated moving bed (SMB) chromatographic process for such separation in a systematic way. As a first step in this work, commercially available adsorbents were screened for their applicability to the considered separation, which revealed that Amberchrom-CG71C resin had a sufficient potential as an adsorbent of the targeted SMB. Using this adsorbent, the intrinsic parameters of the two acids were determined and then applied for optimizing the SMB process under consideration such as low equipment cost, high throughput, and high levels of fumaric acid purity, recovery, and concentration. The SMB operation parameters were optimized by the aid of up to date genetic algorithm and column model in combination. The optimized SMB process was tested experimentally, from which the yield of fumaric-acid product was found to become lower than expected in the design. The study about the reason for such problem showed that a fronting phenomenon occurred in the solute band of fumaric acid. To resolve this issue, the extent of the fronting was evaluated quantitatively using an experimental axial dispersion coefficient for fumaric acid, which was then considered in the design of the SMB of interest. The SMB experimental results demonstrated that the SMB design based on the consideration of the fumaric-acid fronting could guarantee both high purity (>99%) and high yield (>99%) for the fumaric-acid product under the desorbent consumption of 2.6 and the throughput of 0.36 L/L/hr.