Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 117585, Singapore.
Nat Commun. 2018 Apr 12;9(1):1426. doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-03612-2.
The organic solvent forward osmosis (OSFO) process can simultaneously concentrate the active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and recover the organic solvents. Here we demonstrate and evaluate an OSFO process for solvent recovery. In this demonstration, OSFO was conducted in different solvents with different draw solutes. The OSFO process shows rejections >98% when recovering organic solvents from different feed solutions, even when the feed concentration is as high as 20 wt%. More importantly, all systems exhibit relatively low ratios of reverse solute flux to solvent flux, indicating that the adverse effects of using hazardous draw solutions could be minimized. Nevertheless, the use of non-hazardous draw solutes such as citric acid is highly recommended to remove any potential risk, and it has been demonstrated. Herein, the OSFO process is a promising technology for solvent recovery as it possesses a reasonable solvent flux, low reverse solute flux and requires no external pressure.
有机溶剂正向渗透（OSFO）工艺可以同时浓缩活性药物成分（APIs）并回收有机溶剂。在这里，我们展示和评估了一种用于溶剂回收的 OSFO 工艺。在该演示中，使用不同的汲取剂在不同的有机溶剂中进行 OSFO。即使进料浓度高达 20wt%，OSFO 工艺在从不同进料溶液中回收有机溶剂时的截留率>98%。更重要的是，所有系统的反向溶质通量与溶剂通量的比值都相对较低，这表明使用危险汲取剂的不利影响可以最小化。然而，强烈推荐使用柠檬酸等非危险汲取剂来消除任何潜在风险，并且已经得到了验证。在此，OSFO 工艺是一种很有前途的溶剂回收技术，因为它具有合理的溶剂通量、低反向溶质通量且无需外部压力。
