(326l) Separation Of Organic Acids From Fermenation Broths Using Electrodeionization: Fundamental Determination Of Wafer Thickness On Transport Properties

Bioproccessing offers advantages over traditional processing including fewer by-products and milder operating conditions. Of particular interest is biocatalyst-driven separation of organic acids for applications in industry and medicine. Currently these are quite expensive to produce due to the difficulty of separation from dilute bioprocessing solutions. The proposed technology we will study is wafer enhanced electrodeionization (WE-EDI), which uses ion exchange wafers and an electric field to selectively remove ions from uncharged species even at very low concentrations. WE-EDI is highly pursuable and desirable because of the large binding surface area, concurrent product removal and production, high efficiency and ease of operations compared to loose resins. Current modeling efforts for EDI do not fully take into account water splitting, ion selectivity, and flow rates. We will present some new modeling that will give a better understanding of this technique and suggest applications for future work in this area.