DESIGN AND OPERATION OF SIMULATED MOVING BED PROCESSES FOR FINE CHEMICAL AND PHARMACEUTICAL SEPARATIONS

The evolution of food, agrochemical, pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries is clearly moving towards purer products and cleaner processes, due to stricter regulations and growing environmental concerns. This trend calls for better technologies, particularly separation process technologies, which are better controlled once implemented. Preparative chromatography, particularly using SMBs, has been increasing its importance as a separation and purification process in the above mentioned industries, since it is flexible, energy efficient and achieves high purity performance. Nowadays, the SMB technology is adopted in these industries for difficult applications, such as the resolution of enantiomers, and it is considered attractive for complex separation tasks, such as bio-separations or separation of natural compounds involving a number of difficult-to-characterize compounds. Therefore, there are now a large number of potential small-scale applications of the SMB technology that call for a new SMB paradigm, which exploits the flexibility and versatility of the technology. Proper implementation of SMBs in production will require the application of robust control techniques. The issue of process control under uncertainties has to be addressed