Automatic Control of Simulated Moving Beds—Experimental Verification

Abstract

Simulated moving bed (SMB) chromatography has become the state of the art technology applied for the complex separation tasks in the pharmaceutical and fine chemical industry. Nevertheless, operation of SMB units at their optimal operating conditions is still an issue challenging SMB practitioners due to absence of proper process control schemes. We have developed a feedback control scheme that integrates the on-line optimization and control of SMB units. A significant feature of the developed SMB control concept is that only a minimum of system information has to be provided, i.e., the average packing characteristics of the SMB columns and the linear adsorption isotherm, regardless of the type of isotherm characterizing the mixture to be separated. Therefore a detailed characterization of the columns and the separation system is no longer required. This paper demonstrates the experimental implementation of this control concept and presents results referring to two different experimental runs.