Industrial hydrophobic adsorbent screening for the separation of 1-phenylethanol and acetophenone

Abstract

The biocatalytic conversion of acetophenone into 1-phenylethanol is a promising way to prepare a natural aroma. This work deals with adsorption on hydrophobic adsorbents as a way of separation of the product from the unreacted substrate. Seventeen types of industrial hydrophobic adsorbents were screened for their application potential in this separation. Batch equilibrium measurements were performed for these adsorbents, and the data were well fitted with the competitive Langmuir isotherm. All adsorbents had good capacities and many of them also exhibited good selectivity. The selectivity of the best was higher than 10. Since 1-phenylethanol was found to have a lower affinity than acetophenone, its recovery from the column outlet stream was first examined via ideal model simulations for a feed containing 5 g/L of 1-phenylethanol and 0.5 g/L of acetophenone. The adsorbent with the highest selectivity, Amberlite FPX68, could deliver a theoretical yield of 92.6 % for pure 1-phenylethanol. A fixed bed verification experiment provided a product collected in 55 bed volumes with 99 % purity and 87.8 % yield.