Recuperación de ácidos orgánicos de mezclas acuosas mediante adsorción en lecho móvil simulado (SMB)

Resum

The work presented below has been carried out in the research group "Catalysis and Separation Processes (CyPS)" in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials at the Faculty of Chemical Sciences of the Complutense University of Madrid.Biotechnological production of organic acids occupies an important place in the production of basic chemicals products and represents an environmentally sustainable alternative in comparison to synthesis based on non-renewable raw materials such as petroleum. The increasing demand for organic acids has led to the need to find new ways to increase the yield of their biological production and the development of recovery methods that make the process cost-effective.The organic acids with wide industrial application studied in this thesis are acetic, succinic, formic and citric acids. All of them can be produced by fermentation using biomass or residues from different industrial activities as raw materials. However, the subsequent separation of the organic acid from the rest of the compounds present in the broth represents a great challenge for this type of production, since this stage can represent more than 50% of the total cost of the overall process. For this reason, the development of efficient and economically profitable separation processes is required to make biological production a feasible option...