Preparative-scale amino acid separation by thermal parametric pumping on an ion-exchange resin

Thermal parametric pumping was experimentally investigated for the concentration and separation of amino acids. Previous theories of parametric pumping were improved by taking into account dissociation equilibria in the liquid phase. Experiments were carried out with a mixture of glutamic acid, aspartic acid, serine and threonine in a highly acidic solution (HCl). A multi-component equilibrium model was mainly used to simulate the experimental results and to investigate the effect of chloride concentration over a wide range. It is shown that it is always possible to concentrate the amino acids and to separate some of them under certain conditions.