ABSTRACT
Preparative chromatography continues to be the dominant purification technique in the production of biological compounds, especially in the pharmaceutical and biotechnological industries. However, the conceptual complexity of a purely theoretical approach to preparative chromatography is formidable, because we are dealing with systems of highly coupled, nonlinear partial differential equations [1, 2]. Although theoretical work is progressing, it can currently capture predictively only a few aspects of realistic biotechnological separations, especially given the extremely complex biochemical feedstocks often used in these applications. It is not entirely coincidental that the current approach to scale-up and optimization in industry is highly empirical. Although this is natural, especially given the constraints of process validation, the first few chapters of this book attempt to show that current theoretical understanding does give insight into the practical issues involved in scale-up and optimization. These chapters show that a careful combination of basic theory with experiments can reduce the time needed to achieve an effective scale-up of a realistic chromatographic separation.
