Abstract
At present, polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) have been considered as a promising alternative to conventional plastics due to their diverse variability in structure and rapid biodegradation. To ensure cost competitiveness in the market, thermoseparating aqueous two-phase extraction (ATPE) with the advantages of being mild and environmental-friendly was suggested as the primary isolation and purification tool for PHAs. Utilizing two-level full factorial design, this work studied the influence and interaction between four independent variables on the partitioning behavior of PHAs. Based on the experimental results, feed forward neural network (FFNN) was used to develop an empirical model of PHAs based on the ATPE thermoseparating input-output parameter. In this case, bootstrap resampling technique was used to generate more data. At the conditions of 15 wt % phosphate salt, 18 wt % ethylene oxide–propylene oxide (EOPO), and pH 10 without the addition of NaCl, the purification and recovery of PHAs achieved a highest yield of 93.9%. Overall, the statistical analysis demonstrated that the phosphate concentration and thermoseparating polymer concentration were the most significant parameters due to their individual influence and synergistic interaction between them on all the response variables. The final results of the FFNN model showed the ability of the model to seamlessly generalize the relationship between the input–output of the process.
Highlights
Conventional plastics have become an indispensable part of human daily life owing to their wide range of applications [1]
Statistical Experimental Result In aqueous two-phase extraction (ATPE), biomolecules have a complex partitioning behavior which is influenced by the charge, molecular size, electrochemical properties, and hydrophobicity of the proteins
The results of two-level full factorial models on response variables of yield, partition coefficient, and purification factor demonstrated that this strategy can recover PHAs effectively with advantages over the conventional methods
Summary
Conventional plastics have become an indispensable part of human daily life owing to their wide range of applications [1]. PHAs are thermoplastics with the attractive characteristics of being renewable, biodegradable, biocompatible, non-toxic, inert, water-insoluble, indefinitely stable in air, and having properties similar to conventional plastics [4,5,6]. Following the carbon source [8], downstream processing contributes to a major share of PHAs’ production cost [9]. It has been considered a bottleneck in providing a competitive price for PHAs on the market. Conventional PHA purification techniques such as solvent extraction, enzymatic and chemical digestion, and others have the downside of not being environmental-friendly enough due to the large amount of volatile and toxic solvent consumption, the disruption and degradation of the PHAs’ natural morphology as well as the high cost [10,11]. There is an urgent need for a cost-effective and green strategy to purify and recover PHAs in large-scale
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