Scale-up in centrifugal partition chromatography: The “free-space between peaks” method

Centrifugal Partition Chromatography (CPC) is a purification technique using a biphasic liquid system. As a preparative separation technique, scale-up is of primary concern. Once the separation is optimized on a lab-scale instrument, the scale-up transfer is quite straightforward simply using the instrument volume ratio as the linear transfer factor, thanks to the absence of solid support. Such linear transfer underestimates the performances of large-scale CPC rotors that are usually better than that of small rotors. It means that more material than predicted by the linear estimation could be purified. A fully practical method based on experimental observations is proposed. The first step is to determine experimentally the free space volume available between the two peaks of interest doing two analytical separations, one with the small analytical CPC instrument, giving ΔV1, and the second with the large preparative one, giving ΔV2. The second step is to determine on the small CPC instrument how much material can be loaded to reach the maximum mass load still giving the required purity and recovery ratio of the desired compound. Then, an accurate prediction of the maximal quantity of sample that the large-scale rotor can purify is simply obtained by multiplying the maximum mass load on the analytical CPC instrument by the free-space between peaks ΔV2/ΔV1 ratio. For demonstration purposes, the method is applied to the transfer of the CPC separation of a synthetic three-GUESS-compound mixture from a 35 mL-rotor to a semi-prep 239-mL rotor. The paper addresses also the operating condition optimization depending on industrial production strategy (maximal load per run or maximal productivity).