Commercial driving forces

Table 13.1 Some commercial driving forces for the use of biocatalysts.

In the context of this chapter biocatalysis is the use of enzymes or enzymes still associated with their parent cells, to carry out defined chemical reactions under controlled conditions, so as to efficiently convert raw materials into commercially more valuable products. Some of the commercial driving forces for the use of biocatalysts are listed in Table 13.1. 

In summary, this thematic issue covers a fast-moving field that encompasses principles from nearly all branches of chemistry. The articles beautifully illustrate both of the following that research with a commercial driving force can lead to outstanding advances in fundamental chemistry and that fundamental research in chemistry can lead to outstanding technological and commercial advances. 

Gas Separation. During the 1980s, gas separation using membranes became a commercially important process the size of this appHcation is stiH increasing rapidly. In gas separation, one of the components of the feed permeates a permselective membrane at a much higher rate than the others. The driving force is the pressure difference between the pressurized feed gas and the lower pressure permeate. 

Partial Pressure Pinch An example of the hmitations of the partial pressure pinch is the dehumidification of air by membrane. While O9 is the fast gas in air separation, in this apphcation H9O is faster still. Special dehydration membranes exhibit a = 20,000. As gas passes down the membrane, the pai-dal pressure of H9O drops rapidly in the feed. Since the H9O in the permeate is diluted only by the O9 and N9 permeating simultaneously, p oo rises rapidly in the permeate. Soon there is no driving force. The commercial solution is to take some of the diy air product and introduce it into the permeate side as a countercurrent sweep gas, to dilute the permeate and lower the H9O partial pressure. It is in effect the introduction of a leak into the membrane, but it is a controlled leak and it is introduced at the optimum position. 

Classical gels had a low degree of cross-linkage and were of a large particle size. This resulted in that modest flow rates could only be applied and the separation time was typically 10 hr, which at that time was perfectly acceptable, keeping in mind that preparation of the column could take up to 2 days or more. After the introduction of Sephadex, new materials have been introduced continuously on the market, and still, 30 years after the introduction of the first commercial material, new media are still introduced, also from the originators of Sephadex. What are the driving forces behind this development and what are the features of these new media ... 

These policy decisions by the FDA were the driving force for chiral switches and the commercial development of chromatographic processes such as simulated moving bed (SMB) technology. Due to technological advances such as SMB and the commercial availability of CSPs in bulk quantities for process-scale purification of enantiopure drugs, the production of many single enantiomers now exists on a commercial scale. 

Ultrafiltration processes (commonly UF or UF/DF) employ pressure driving forces of 0.2 to 1.0 MPa to drive liquid solvents (primarily water) and small solutes through membranes while retaining solutes of 10 to 1000 A diameter (roughly 300 to 1000 kDa). Commercial operation is almost exclusively run as TFF with water treatment applications run as NFF. Virus-retaining filters are on the most open end of UF and can be run as NFF or TFF. Small-scale sample preparation in dilute solutions can be run as NFF in centrifuge tubes. 

This device has not reached commercialization, no doubt in part because bulk electrochemical transport of major gaseous components will rarely be economical compared with more standard separation processes. It is in the transport of minority species from low partial pressure to high (e.g. 02 from seawater, C02 from air) where the benefits of the electrochemical driving force, as detailed at the outset of this chapter can best be exploited. Two final examples of contaminant control of great commercial interest demonstrate this principle. 

Example 2-3 Scale-Up of Pipe Flow. We would like to know the total pressure driving force (AP) required to pump oil (/z = 30 cP, p = 0.85 g/cm3) through a horizontal pipeline with a diameter (D) of 48 in. and a length (L) of 700 mi, at a flow rate (Q) of 1 million barrels per day. The pipe is to be of commercial steel, which has an equivalent roughness (e) of 0.0018 in. To get this information, we want to design a laboratory experiment in which the laboratory model (m) and the full-scale field pipeline (f) are operating under dynamically similar conditions so that measurements of AP in the model can be scaled up directly to find AP in the field. The necessary conditions for dynamic similarity for this system are... 

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