Faculty Involved: Glasser, Khinast, Moghe, Muzzio, Tomassone

Several faculty members are actively involved in highly interdisciplinary research in separation science. The work draws on a wide array of resources at the University and at several pharmaceutical, biotechnology and chemical companies in the area. Separation processes are of major importance to these companies and this has led to active collaborations. An area of current research is fluidized bed adsorption of biomolecules. Fluidized or expanded bed adsorption has been used as a primary recovery unit operation to extract proteins from feedstocks without the need for cell removal prior to adsorption. The separation technique thus offers the advantage of product capture, feedstock clarification and product concentration in one step; examples include the recovery of recombinant human serum albumin from mammalian cell cultures and separation of cloned sialidase from E. coli fermentation broths. Current research focuses on determining the fundamental processes that limit the rate of adsorption. Especially designed adsorption particles are studied in fluidized beds using both lysozyme (as a model biomolecule) and industrially relevant proteins. The goal is to develop an understanding of how mass transfer and hydrodynamics couple in the fluidized bed. Mathematical models taking into account the resistances to mass transfer, equilibrium partition isotherms, and the liquid-particle hydrodynamics are used to develop insight and evaluate design configurations. Other research projects include the adsorption of low-concentrated multicomponent gas mixtures in cyclic adsorption processes, like pressure swing and temperature swing adsorption. Experimental and theoretical studies includes the tailoring of adsorbents for specific separation problems, and the measurement of adsorption kinetics as well as single and multi-component adsorption isotherms. This information is collected in a simulation code which is used for optimization and control of the process.