(626b) Energy Minimization Using Electrodeionization: Organic Acid Production and Separation

Bioproccessing offers advantages over traditional chemical processing including fewer by-products and milder operating conditions. One application 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. Further, organic acids can have a negative effect on many fermentations (1) and the removal and\or control of the organic acids is key to efficiently designed processes. Our group has looked at a technology called 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 (2). WE-EDI is highly pursuable and desirable because of the large binding surface area, concurrent product removal and production, and high efficiency and ease of operations compared to loose resins. Further, as opposed to electrodialysis, WE-EDI can remove ions at extremely low concentrations, as low as 10 ppb. In this paper, we will talk about design aspects of a WE-EDI system, modeling of selective organic ion removal, and preliminary economics of such a process.

REFERENCES

1. J. A. Hestekin, S. Snyder, and B. Davison, ?Direct Product Capture from Biotransformations?, ChemPlus Report, Chemical Vision 2020 (2002).

2. M. B. Arora and J. A. Hestekin, S. W. Snyder, E. J. St. Martin, M. I. Donnelly, C. Sanville-Millard, and Y. J. Lin, ?The Separative Bioreactor: A Continuous Separation Process for Simultaneous Production and Direct Capture of Organic Acids?, Sep. Sci. Tech., in press (2007).