Comparison of the relative merits of port-location rearrangement and partial-feeding as the strategy for improving the performances of a three-zone simulated moving chromatography for separation of succinic acid and lactic acid.

The three-zone simulated moving bed (SMB) chromatographic process for separation of succinic acid and lactic acid, which has been developed previously, was based on a classical port-location arrangement (desorbent→extract→feed→raffinate) and a classical feeding mode (full-feeding). To improve the performance of the three-zone SMB process, it is worth utilizing the strategy of either a port-location rearrangement (desorbent→feed→raffinate→extract) or a partial-feeding. To investigate which of the two strategies is more effective, the three-zone SMBs based on the port-location rearrangement (PR) and the partial-feeding (PF) were optimized each under equal conditions and then the two strategies were compared in terms of product purities or throughput. The result showed that the PR strategy led to higher purities or higher throughput than the PF strategy in regard to the previously reported three-zone SMB system. To check whether such trend is still valid in other separation systems, the above optimization works were repeated while varying only the selectivity between two feed components. It was confirmed that the PR strategy is definitely superior to the PF strategy. However, such superiority of the PR over the PF strategy is lessened as the selectivity becomes lower. If the selectivity is significantly low, the PR strategy is rather outperformed by the PF strategy.