ABSTRACT
Simulated moving bed (SMB) chromatography (Broughton & Gerhold 1961) is an important separation technique in chemical engineering. After first applications in petroleum and sugar separation, it serves nowadays as a crucial technique for enantiomer separations in the pharmaceutical industry (Ganetsos & Barker 1992). In an SMB unit, multiple chromatographic columns are arranged circularly, and the inlets and outlets are periodically switched. After a transient phase, an SMB process normally reaches a so-called cyclic steady state (CSS), which is typically used for production purposes. Since the CSS is a function of the operating conditions, finding an “optimal” CSS, e.g., the one corresponding to the highest production rate while fulfilling the requirements on production purities, is of great interest in the analysis of SMB systems, e.g., (Rajendran, Paredes, & Mazzotti 2009, Seidel-Morgenstern, Keßler, & Kaspereit 2008).
