Chemical Engineering October 2021 - 17

Sulzer
make 100 grams, making 10 tons
continuously is often a challenge. "
While the laboratory may use liquid
FIGURE 4. Often, technology providers rely on
extractions using solvents to extract ingredients or
biochemicals from highly diluted feeds and proven
crystallization techniques to reach the desired
purity. Shown here is a large liquid-liquid extraction
column
Switzerland; www.sulzer.com). " The
challenges on the downstream side
are coming from the upstream part
of the process, " he says. " They create
dilute streams that contain a lot
of water and a mix of different products.
This mix of smaller impurities
makes it difficult to concentrate and
purify the one product they want
to have. Furthering the challenge is
the range of natural feedstocks that
often have some seasonality or process
differences that generate varying
impurities with time. Often, in
the lab, biotech companies will use
one set of techniques to purify, but,
from a cost perspective, are nearly
impossible to replicate on an industrial
scale. While it seems feasible to
chromatography or difficult solventcrystallization
methods to achieve
their results, they often prove to be
impossible to scale up, so providers
such as Sulzer must find ways
to use standard techniques, such as
extraction, to make the downstream
process profitable and scalable.
Finding the technique that provides
the desired outcome in a way that is
profitable requires pilot testing and
tweaking of existing technologies. " If
you look at the chemical industry, the
most widely used separation technology
is distillation, " Farquet says. " We
still use it, but in most bioprocessing
applications, it works for concentration
stages, but it is unlikely you
will get to the necessary final purity
levels just by using distillation techniques. "
Often technology providers
rely on extractions using solvents to
extract ingredients (Figure 4) or biochemicals
from highly diluted feeds
and proven crystallization techniques
to reach the desired purity. In other
cases, they may employ techniques
like adsorptions to adsorb organic
impurities that can't be removed via
traditional technologies. " All sorts of
techniques have to be examined,
tested and possibly combined in
order to find the method that works
best to get the product that is needed
with a reasonable cost, " he says.
Pramod Kumbhar, CTO with Praj
Industries (Pune, India; www.praj.net)
agrees that scaling up can be difficult,
especially as processors are moving
toward continuous processing versus
batch. " With a mindshare towards
continuous manufacturing in the biotech
space, high-capacity plants that
are planned to provide economies of
scale create two challenges: handling
large volumes calls for very high capital
expenses and increases the risk
involved. Gradual scale up of output
without very high capital expenses
and fewer risks or problems due to
lower volume handling call for deeper
engagement at the process development
stage, " says Kumbhar. " This
also means we need to focus on all
the disciplines of the plant, including
process, infrastructure and automation.
And for the connected world,
there is a growing need to make the
system future-ready. This calls for a
different thought process going forward
that involves plant automation,
integration, data management and
predictability, " he says.
" Centralized process-automation
solutions will have to be integrated
with enterprise software to manage
inventory, process data, proactive
maintenance and real time records.
This will form the foundation for artificial
intelligence in process plants
and will be the eventual future of bioprocessing, "
says Kumbhar.
n
Joy LePree
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Chemical Engineering October 2021

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