Separations Technology

Our unique separation capabilities and development-oriented staff can resolve your chromatography challenges when chromatography simply cannot be avoided. We have development through commercial scale equipment to accommodate gram-scale purifications through multi-metric ton quantities.

SFC:

Supercritical Fluid Chromatography utilizes supercritical CO₂ as a replacement for traditional non-polar organic solvents and is particularly useful for purification of materials with poor solution stability.

Pharma Materials houses the largest SFC unit in North America, which is built and operated in full compliance with cGMP guidelines. This unit, the SUPERSEP 200, utilizes 20 cm ID columns with a CO₂ recycling system to minimize the solvent requirements for the purification.

Purified fractions are separated from CO₂ in gas-liquid cyclonic separators. The pressure is dropped to precipitate/liquefy the solutes in the cyclones.

SMB:

Simulated Moving Bed (SMB) is a powerful and versatile tool for the preparation of chiral drugs as well as a wide variety of other APIs. SMB is primarily used for binary separations such as enantiomeric purifications, but it can be used to achieve chemical purifications as well. By using a two-pass approach, complicated purifications can be performed using SMB when necessary to achieve the desired throughput.

Our largest system utilizes up to six 25 cm ID columns with a valve system to simulate a moving bed purification system. The number of columns used is adjusted to meet the needs of the separation and can use 6-8 columns depending on the chromatography needs. Each 25 cm ID columns each holds approximately 3 kg of solid phase and are custom packed on site with commercially available phase.

Scale up of the SMB purification through the development process and to commercial manufacturing generally does not require additional development, which is often a significant concern with the scale up of traditional single pass chromatography.

Our SMB units utilize Thin Film Evaporators (TFEs) to concentrate eluant streams. We have two one-square-foot TFEs and two five-square-foot TFEs that accommodate the eluant streams. The TFEs, in combination with a solvent recycling system, support an economically feasible process.

Preparative HPLC:

We employ preparative HPLC for the purification of multi-component mixtures when traditional purification means aren’t viable.

Our systems utilize 10 to 50 cm ID columns with pumps that produce flow rates up to 600 L/hr. The 50 cm column holds approximately 50 kg of solid phase and is custom packed on site with commercially available phase.

The eluant handling systems we presently have can utilize automated rotary evaporators or thin film evaporators (TFE) depending on the process needs. We have two one-square-foot TFE units that support small-scale chromatography and two five-square-foot TFE units to support chromatography using the 30 and 50 cm columns.