Hybridizing Simulated Moving Bed and Electrodialysis: Product Purification and Eluent Regeneration.

Complex streams in bio-based industries require efficient downstream processing units. Simulated moving-bed (SMB) chromatography is known to improve process efficiency by reducing resin and buffer requirement, but it can be further enhanced by technology hybridization. In the current experiments, an SMB system has been integrated with a bipolar electrodialysis (BPED) system. SMB purified γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) from a clarified fermentation broth while BPED processed the product-containing eluent stream into recyclable eluent and purified product streams. The continuous operation did not result in any impurity accumulation.