The Development and Applications of Preparative-Scale Continuous Chromatography

Abstract The scaling up of continuous chromatography to production scale is considered. The various continuous countercurrent and crosscurrent chromato-graphic techniques have been reviewed and judged according to their merits. The latest developments on a preparative/production scale semicontinuous chroma-tographic refiner (SCCR), consisting of 12 columns each of 5.4 cm i.d. × 75 cm long and packed with calcium charged resin, are reported. When the production of high fructrose corn syrup was carried out using industrial barley syfup, product throughputs of 32.3 kg sugar solids/m3 resin/h were obtained, the fructose-rich product purity was over 90% with a concentration of 12.96% w/v, and glucose-rich product contained only 6.69% fructose and had a concentration of 25.4% w/v. The computer simulation of the SCCR's operation is reported, and a good fit with experimental data was obtained.