Validação de software para simulação cromatográfica

Abstract

The global market for bioproducts has shown a great increase in recent years, and shows the prospect of an even greater increase in the coming years. In the manufacture of bioproducts, the purification step (or downstream) is shown to be a bottleneck in economic viability, representing 50% to 80% of the total cost of these processes. Liquid chromatography is a type of mixture separation of great importance in the manufacture of bioproducts, due to its versatility, allowing a large number of combinations and strategies. Several molecules of high added value are produced in a complex mixture, with several components, in opposition to the specification for high purity in the final product. In these cases, chromatography is the most common choice in the purification steps. The high cost and development time of chromatographic processes can represent an obstacle for new products to reach the market and reduce the economic viability of implementing the process on a large scale. This reaffirms the importance of finding ways to simplify the development of these separation techniques and make them more affordable. Thus, the present work aimed to test the application of the Croma Dash Engine software (Registered at INPI, Process Nº: BR512022000420-8), for chromatography simulation using devices such as parametric sensitivity tests and applied simulations. From the simulations, the results obtained using different interpolators were evaluated, in order to define the Koren interpolation method as the most viable for the adopted process conditions, being this method accurate when using a mesh with a relatively small number of nodes. (200 in most cases), which provided timely simulation. It was also possible to analyze the behavior of the simulated peaks in terms of what is expected by the physical chemistry of the chromatographic process. The qualitative behavior was evaluated according to what is expected from the literature, both in experimental and simulation terms. It was possible to observe the sharpening effect, which is expected under overload conditions, relatively short lengths and favorable isotherm. In addition, the peaks with greater funneling also showed development to a constant pattern behavior, something known in the literature and important in experimentation for scaling up of adsorption columns.