Modeling and State Observation Design of Simulated Moving Bed Process

Simulated moving bed (SMB) chromatography has become a widely used separation technology in the pharmaceutical and fine chemical industries. In particular, the separation of enantimeric mixtures has received recently great interest because it can achieve good performances and high productions. However, there are a lot of difficulties in the modeling of SMB chromatography process because of the great number of parameters involved and the computational burden needed for the solution of these models. To overcome these difficulties, a simplified SMB concentration model is derived which comprises a linear time-variant discrete-time state-space model. Furthermore, toward some parameter measurement limited, for example, discrete-time concentration, a state observation based on this model is designed. Simulation results are presented to show the applicability of the developed observer in the surrounding of the stationary operation point