New program selects the optimal route
Many routes lead to Rome
In 2009 Albemarle, DSM and former Organon initiated an ISPT project (PH-00-02) to develop a program for evaluating purification process routes in the production of pharmaceuticals. The three partners liked to have a tool by which not only process engineers, but also product developers could gain insight their envisaged process; What is the most feasible separation train for large scale production? Does the configuration in the lab fit into a multi-purpose plant? Do we have the right size of equipment? How do alternative purification steps as chromatography perform? What will be the cost price? How much time and manpower is involved to make a certain amount of API? Many questions, many routes that lead to Rome. But which one to choose?
It is this question that was addressed by defining a project at the TUe, supervised by Andre de Haan and Edwin Zondervan. Two years ago post doc Ana Morao started with this project, and developed in quite a short time a marvel of a program that is able to evaluate these routes in a quick way. The crux of the program is that it uses the existing tools in Aspen, guaranteeing high quality mass and heat balances. The economic and technical evaluation is done in Excel itself. Here it compares the different routes. The program is pretty fast in its calculation, because it calls the units in a sequence; there are no recycles. Currently it evaluated 15 routes within about 10 minutes, fast enough for the current need. After the calculation the user can browse through the rankings on cost price, product quality, and other options. Excel has made the program very user friendly. Users are lead through the program by hand, and have the option to change at any stage the input parameters.
The Excel program, including the specific codes in VBA to communicate with Aspen, is currently implemented at the three industrial partners for testing it.
The model has still room for further improvement; cost calculation could be made more accurately, more new separation techniques, like SIRS, and SMB, can be added and for very large separation trains it will be probably required to include a strategy tool that stops with calculations as soon as a route becomes too expensive. These improvements will be made working on new cases of ISPT partners.
