SIMULATED MOVING-BED REACTOR - APPLICATION IN BIOREACTION AND SEPARATION

The performance of simulated moving-bed reactor for two semicontinuous chromatographic reaction-separation processes, namely, isomerization of glucose to fructose (Hashimoto ct al., 1993) and inversion of sucro se to glucose and fructose (Ganetsos et al., 1993), has been studied b y mathematical modeling and numerical simulations. Simulation results agreed well with the published experimental results. The process perfo rmance, which is stated in terms of the process performance parameters defined in this paper, was also studied for various operating conditi ons, for both the processes. Since the reaction was introduced in the process, reaction conversion becomes a process performance parameter o f importance, which was considered along with product purity and recov ery. The criteria of the operating parameter (Ruthven and Ching, 1989) for linear systems for a simulated moving-bed process is not applicab le for a simulated moving-bed reactor process in some cases.