Poster Presentation 7-12

 

Continuous Clavulanic Acid Adsorption Process

 

Renata M.R.G. Almeida, Marlei Barboza, Carlos O. Hokka

 

Department of Chemical Engineering

Federal University of São Carlos

Rod. Washington Luiz

km 235 - C.P. 676

13565-905 – São Carlos – SP – Brazil

 

Telephone:  (+5516) 260-8264; Fax:  (+5516) 260-8266; E-mail:  prmrg@iris.ufscar.br

 

 

A great number of pathogenic bacteria, which are resistant to penicillins and cephalosporins, owe their resistance to the production of beta-lactamases enzymes that inactivate the antibiotics by cleaving their beta lactam ring.  Clavulanic acid (CA), a potent inhibitor of these enzymes, is also a beta-lactam antibiotic and represents a new trend of therapeutic strategy which uses it in combination with semi-synthetic penicillins like amoxycillin.  This antibiotic has no strong hydrophobic groups and presents high degradation rates, which leads to low recovery yields during the purification process.  Adsorption in a continuous process with adsorbent recycle appears to be an alternative process to clavulanic acid purification.

 

In this work adsorption kinetic and equilibrium data of CA on ion exchange resin Amberlite IRA 400 in chloride cycle were utilized to carry out the modelling and simulation of a continuous adsorption process.  The simulation of this process allowed the determination of mass transfer parameters like the diffusion coefficient in the resin pores and the mass transfer coefficient in the liquid film.  The yield, concentration and purification factors of the process were estimated utilizing the final product concentration obtained by simulations.  Experimental runs of the continuous adsorption process system were carried out utilizing the simulation conditions and the experimental results were compared with those calculated by the proposed model.

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