The Front Velocity approach in the modelling of Simulated Moving Bed process (SMB)

The Simulated Moving Bed (SMB) is a countercurrent and continuum process that presents a high separation efficiency. It has been extensively applied in the separation of the petrochemical compounds, in the enantiomeric separation of racemic drugs, and in other mixtures that are difficult to separate. Currently the models used to predict the mass transport along chromatographic columns consist of systems of partial differential equations that presents a high computational cost. To modeling SMB process the novel approach Front Velocity is presented. This consists of ordinary differential equations and do not utilize adsorption isotherms, and therefore it is not necessary to perform equilibrium experiments, which are common procedures in classical modeling. The first stage of the research work was to characterize the chromatographic column, where the Random constraint window (R2W) algorithm was employed associate to a kinetic mass transfer equation of the new approach in the solution of the inverse problem. With the parameters obtained in the characterization of the chromatographic column, the SMB process simulation was performed, obtaining the separation profiles of the studied compounds. To validate the model developed, the simulated results were compared with experimental data of enantiomeric separation of the Ketamine, also confronted with the simulations obtained from classical models. The results show that the Front Velocity model has a reasonable agreement with experimental data. Likewise showed similar results to those separation profiles obtained by classical modeling using partial differential equations, requiring computational cost about twenty times smaller.