Simulated Moving-Bed Liquid Chromatography with Three Zones for Continuous Desalting of Organic Compounds

Aqueous solutions of DL-β-phenylalanine from a biotechnological process have been desalted by simulated moving bed preparative liquid-chromatography (SMB LC). During the design of a laboratory-scale continuous procedure four kinds of reversed-phase polymeric resin were compared. A suitable adsorbent was chosen and operating conditions were subsequently optimized by using equilibrium data obtained experimentally; productivity of the amino acid was used as the optimization target function. This enabled improvement of operating conditions determined in the first step of the procedure.