Process Economics: Evaluation of the Potential of ATPS as a Feasible Alternative to Traditional Fractionation Techniques Chapter in Scopus uri icon

abstract

  • © 2017, Springer International Publishing AG. Research has demonstrated how successful ATPS is to recover or purify different bioproducts, including proteins. They pose several advantages, which include cheap and nontoxic materials for their construction and linear scale-up, and it does not require a complex equipment for operation. All of these have the potential to help ATPS to decrease production costs, but there are no formal studies that perform economic evaluations for bioprocesses that include ATPS as the core for protein recovery/purification. Recently, work in this area has been done in order to boost the inclusion of ATPS at large scale by demonstrating their combined process and economic capabilities. This chapter present the methodology of bioprocess modeling coupled with economic analyses, which can create virtual bioprocesses based on experimental data in order to answer questions that arise during bioprocess design. This chapter discusses four economic analyses through bioprocess modeling for ATPS-based bioprocesses. Results indicate the existence of three main considerations: (1) the fermentation titer is the most critical parameter for the production costs and the need of optimization of this parameter, (2) the unit operation in charge of removing ATPS components plays a major role in the contribution to production costs, and (3) changes in production costs due to recycling of phase components are theorized to be highly dependent on the ATPS size. This chapter serves as a platform for future developments to maximize profits for potential companies, but also to lower final costs for more people to access biotechnological products that can elevate quality of life.

publication date

  • January 1, 2017