ABSTRACT
Efficient recovery of ionic liquid (IL) from aqueous mixture of ILs and sugars (which derived from enzymatic or chemical catalyzed hydrolysis of ILs-pretreated biomass) is a major drawback for commercialization of biofuel and platform chemicals production from biomass utilized ILs as pretreatment solvent. In this study, simulated moving bed (SMB) chromatography equipped with ion exclusion column (containing [Emim]+ cation) was investigated to separate sugars (glucose and xylose) which are the main products from biomass hydrolysate and 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium acetate (EmimAc) which is the ILs used for biomass pretreatment. A four-zone SMB system with a configuration of 2-2-2-2 (2 ion exclusion columns in each zone) was used to recover glucose, xylose and EmimAc from their aqueous mixture with yield of 71.38, 99.37 and 98.92%, respectively. Moreover, the optimization of SMB zone configuration by simulation results in a complete recovery of ILs. This result indicates that for the first time, ion exclusion SMB chromatography could be used for complete recovery of ILs from aqueous sugar mixture.
Subject(s)
Biomass , Chromatography/methods , Glucose/isolation & purification , Ionic Liquids/isolation & purification , Xylose/isolation & purification , Adsorption , Biofuels , Glucose/chemistry , Imidazoles/chemistry , Imidazoles/isolation & purification , Ionic Liquids/chemistry , Linear Models , Xylose/chemistryABSTRACT
A bi-level optimizing control scheme originally proposed for a simulated moving bed (SMB) with linear isotherms has been extended to an SMB with nonlinear isotherms. Cyclic steady state optimization is performed in the upper level to determine the optimum switching period and time-varying feed/desorbent flow rates, and repetitive model predictive control is run in the lower level for purity regulation, taking the decision variables from the upper level as feed-forward information. Experimental as well as numerical study for an SMB process separating a high-concentration mixture of aqueous L-ribose and L-arabinose solutions showed that the proposed scheme performs satisfactorily against various disturbances. In contrast, an alternative scheme based on an SMB model with linear isotherms showed a limitation in the control performance; this scheme was apt to fail in purity regulation.
