Simulated moving bed purification of fucoidan hydrolysate for an efficient production of fucose with high purity and little loss

Abstract

Economical production of fucose from fucoidan requires an efficient process for the separation of high purity fucose from fucoidan hydrolysate. To address this issue, we aimed to develop a simulated-moving bed (SMB) process that could be well tailored to the final-stage purification of fucoidan hydrolysate while ensuring the attainment of high purity and high recovery. For this task, we first determined the intrinsic parameters of all the components in the fucoidan hydrolysate. The resulting intrinsic parameters were then applied to the optimal design of the considered SMB process, in which the optimal column configuration and operation parameters leading to the highest removal rates for the side-products (or impurities) of the fucoidan hydrolysate were determined using a genetic-algorithm and a column-model in combination. On the basis of such optimal configurations and operation parameters, the SMB experiments were carried out while loading a real fucoidan-hydrolysate solution into the SMB feed port. It was confirmed from the experimental results that the developed process in this study was quite effective in the continuous-mode recovery of fucose from the fucoidan hydrolysate with high purity (nearly 100%) and little loss (<3.1%).