Department of Chemical Engineering, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, ON L8S 4L7, Canada.
Department of Chemical Engineering, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, ON L8S 4L7, Canada.
J Chromatogr A. 2023 Jun 21;1699:464030. doi: 10.1016/j.chroma.2023.464030. Epub 2023 Apr 26.
Flow uniformity within the device is critically important in membrane chromatography. Recent studies have shown that the design of the device has a significant impact on flow uniformity, and thereby on separation efficiency. The main premise of this work is that computational fluid dynamics (CFD) could serve as a fast and inexpensive tool for preliminary optimization of the design of a membrane chromatography device. CFD also helps in identifying factors that affect flow uniformity. In this paper, CFD is used to compare the fluidic attributes of conventional membrane chromatography devices such as the stacked disc and radial flow devices with those of more recently developed ones such as the different versions of the laterally-fed membrane chromatography (LFMC) device. These are compared based on pulse tracer solute dispersion, which is a useful metric for measuring flow uniformity, and is thereby a good predictor of chromatographic separation performance. The poor separation performance typically observed with conventional membrane chromatography devices could be attributed to the high degree of solute dispersion within these devices. CFD is then used to analyze the impact of factors such as membrane aspect ratio, and channel dimensions on the performance of z-laterally-fed membrane chromatography (zLFMC) devices. The results discussed in the paper demonstrate that CFD could indeed serve as a powerful optimization and performance prediction tool for membrane chromatography.
在膜色谱中，设备内的流型均匀性至关重要。最近的研究表明，设备的设计对流型均匀性，进而对分离效率有重大影响。这项工作的主要前提是计算流体动力学（CFD）可以作为膜色谱设备设计初步优化的快速、廉价工具。CFD 还有助于确定影响流型均匀性的因素。本文使用 CFD 比较了传统膜色谱设备（如堆叠盘和径向流设备）与最近开发的设备（如不同版本的侧向进料膜色谱（LFMC）设备）的流体特性。这是基于脉冲示踪剂溶质扩散来比较的，这是一种衡量流型均匀性的有用指标，也是色谱分离性能的良好预测指标。传统膜色谱设备通常观察到的较差分离性能可归因于这些设备内溶质的高分散度。然后，CFD 用于分析膜纵横比和通道尺寸等因素对 z 侧向进料膜色谱（zLFMC）设备性能的影响。本文讨论的结果表明，CFD 确实可以作为膜色谱的强大优化和性能预测工具。
