Preparative chromatography with supercritical fluids : Comparison of simulated moving bed and batch processes

Preparative chromatography is a key technology for the separation of fine chemicals in production scale. Most of the published studies are carried out using liquid solvents as mobile phase. However, the used organic solvents can often be replaced by supercritical fluids. A reduction or renouncement of organic solvents does not only correspond to the trend of the so-called green chemistry—a sustainable, environmentally friendly production of chemical products. But a changeover to chromatography with supercritical fluids can also be reasonable under economic criteria. In this contribution a comparison between the Batch-supercritical fluid chromatography (Batch-SFC) process and the simulated moving bed (SMB)-SFC process is presented. Because of the minor importance of solvent consumption and solvent recovery in SFC, the separation systems were optimized primarily in terms of their specific productivity. For three of the four investigated model systems, the specific productivity of the SMB process is significantly higher than the productivity of the Batch process. Due to the fact, that the process with the higher specific productivity is not inevitably the more economical process, supplementary the costs of the process were considered. Therefore the comparison of the two processes was done from an economic point of view considering the minimum product price that has to be realized to fulfill the defined economic aim. It was found that although the optimized specific productivities of the SMB process were significantly higher than the productivities of the Batch process, the Batch process is the more profitable process for the investigated production rate range between 0.4 and 5 t/a.