Comparative study of hydrodynamic behavior of liquid expanded bed adsorption: mathematical and short-cut methods

Liquid fluidized/expanded bed adsorption (LF/EBA) is a novel chromatography technique for capturing target biomolecules directly from crude feedstock in downstream processing. To widely extend the LF/EBA technology in biological industries, a better understanding of the expanded-bed behavior is necessary to maximize its efficient applications. In this study, streamline adsorbent was loaded into the column and the bed was subjected to physical and hydrodynamical experiments. Hydrodynamic characteristics of the bed (e.g., Daxl and Bo) with different settled bed height (SBH=5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12cm) along with a variety of column diameters (1,1.6,2.5 cm) have been investigated based on exact mathematical as well as approximate short-cut methods. It was found that the increasing column diameter promoted bed mixing, which was undesirable, and the optimal values for the bed expansion and SBH based on minimal liquid mixing were 80%-130% and 8-10 cm, respectively. However, exploiting the short-cut method for the bed hydrodynamic assessments also demonstrated results as good as the mathematical method. Hydrodynamic behavior of liquid fluidized bed adsorption and the generic application of the short-cut method and its potential as a simple method for study of hydrodynamic performance is discussed.