Increasing the scale of true moving bed electrophoretic separations using filtration to reduce solvent volumetric flows between sections II and III.

Over the past decade the moving bed process has become a commonly used tool for the continuous separation of chiral compounds, and its recent application to electrophoretic separations allows the technique to be used as a model system for moving bed method improvements. Much of the recent research on moving bed separations has focused on improving the technique's efficiency and increasing the maximum attainable throughput. This paper presents a novel method for reducing or reversing the increases in tailing that stem from the addition of the feed stream in a moving bed process by adding a filtration unit which retains the products while removing fluid from the boundary between the sections above and below the feed stream. This filtration-enhanced moving bed process was applied to a true moving bed (TMB) electrophoresis separation in the Vortex Stabilized Electrophoresis Apparatus, and its effect on a homatropine enantiomer separation was studied. Experiments showed that there is a 2.4-fold increase in the homatropine processing rate when 0.5 ml/h of water is removed through a reverse osmosis filter at the boundary between the sections above and below the feed stream. In order to further understand the process, filtration-enhanced TMB (FE-TMB) was also analyzed using a linear model of the system which shows that the 99% purity operating region of the separation is greatly increased even with moderate permeate flowrates.