Supercritical phase behavior for biotransformation processing

In recent works, supercritical carbon dioxide turned out to offer innovative and highly effective alternatives for the workup of biphasic whole-cell biotransformation reaction mixtures. Further optimization of the downstream processing, e.g. by supercritical extraction of the product, requires a reliable simulation of the phase behavior in those systems. In this work, binary and ternary systems containing carbon dioxide and organic components from the biotransformation reaction mixture, such as styrene (substrate), (S)-styrene oxide (product), 2-phenylethanol (byproduct), octane (inducer), and bis-2(ethylhexyl)phthalate (solvent) were measured and modeled for temperatures ranging from 308.15 to 350.15 K and pressures ranging from 5 to 70 MPa using the PC-SAFT equation of state. The obtained results offer the possibility to precisely predict the phase behavior in this system, thus enabling the modeling of e.g. supercritical-fluid extraction steps.

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