(412e) Syrup Manufacturing Capacity Increase By the Application of Sequential Simulated Moving Bed (SSMB)

This objective of this work is to increase the sweetener syrup manufacturing capacity by at least 30% using ion exchange and ion exclusion chromatography, while decreasing the minerals concentration in the wastewater.

Currently, this syrup was processed by the cation/anion ion exchange. The manufacturing capacity was limited because of plant chemical discharge limitation of the government regulation. As a continuous chromatographic process, sequential simulated moving bed (SSMB) has its advantages with increasing production and reducing the chemical usage. To extend the chromatographic resin life time and enhance the SSMB performance, pre-softening column was applied to reduce the feed cations loadings before feed was injected to SSMB.

In this work, the pre-softening resin was selected based not only on the softening performance but also on the syrup characteristic using the isothermal experiment. Impacts of the dry matter and pH as well as feed flow rate on softening performance were studied. In addition, the breakthrough test was also performed to study the resin capacity.

The single column test was used for the resin selection of chromatographic separation process. The design of experiment (DOE) using JMP was used to study the impacts of temperature, dry matter and effluent flowrates on the chromatographic performance. According to the SMB theory and single column results, the chromatographic process was scaled up from bench to pilot scale and run under the designed operating condition. The impact of feed loading and rinse flow rate on the SSMB performance were investigated in this work.

The pilot results showed the manufacturing capacity could be increase by +40% with the application of SSMB.