Towards Large Scale Packed Bed Chromatography Simulations with OpenFOAM R ©

Column liquid chromatography (CLC) is a widely used unit operation in biotech and chemical process engineering for purification of target products (e.g. proteins for pharmaceutical agents) from unwanted substances. An aqueous solution containing the mixture of molecules is forced to flow through the chromatography column which is filled with porous particles (beads). While transport through the interstitial volume between the beads is governed by advection and dispersion, molecules diffuse into the beads and are adsorbed at their inner surfaces. Separation is achieved since the different species exhibit differently strong binding, which leads to different retention times and finally to temporally separated exiting from the column (fig. 1) [1].