Preparation and Characterization of Agarose-Nickel Powder Composite Particles Customized for Expanded Bed Application

Expanded Bed Adsorption (EBA) has been widely used in industrial downstream bioprocessing. The specially designed adsorbent is one of the most important bases to achieve the expanded bed adsorption (EBA) process. The prefect adsorbents tend to be of small size, large pore and high density. Novel dense composite adsorbents for expanded bed adsorption of nanobioproduct/bioproduct have been fabricated by coating 4% Agarose gel onto Nickel powder by a water-in-oil emulsification method. The preparation conditions were explored. The composite particles showed a spherical appearance, suitable size and size distribution, appropriate wet density of 1.92 g/mL. The bed expansion factor at the range of 0.8–3 was investigated and correlated with Richardson–Zaki equation. The residence time distributions were investigated to characterize the hydrodynamic property in the expanded bed. Compared with two evaluation factors (Bo number and axial distribution coefficient Dax), the results indicated that Dax is the best parameter to analyze the bed stability of expanded bed under various operation conditions and matrix properties.