Separation examples which
use the New JO Chromatographic Separation System.
Separation of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) |
Here is an example of the production of eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), or their high purity derivatives from the fat of animals, plants, and microbes such as fish oil, fat from seafood, and cod liver oil.
Reports say that EPA and DHA have the following physiological effects: suppression of platelet clotting, reduction of cholesterol and neutral fat within the plasma, prevention of allergy, etc. Therefore the development of a large scale, cheap, industrial method to produce high purity products of them has been long awaited.
However, it was both technically and economically difficult to industrially produce EPA, DHA or their derivatives at a high purity, due to many types of saturated fatty acids, and unsaturated fatty acids of low and high degrees of unsaturation within the normal fat from seafood, etc.
For raising the purity of DHA ethylester which comes from the material of tuna oil ethylester, first, with a centrifugal thin film distillation machine, you concentrate the DHA ethylester up to the purity of about 60% in preparation to use it as feed for a chromatographic separation.
By processing this feed with the New JO Chromatographic System, we were readily able to do purifications of above 95%.
Tuna oil ethylester (containing 24.6% DHA ethylester) was distilled by a centrifugal thin film molecular distillation machine and a middle concentrate, 60% purity DHA ethylester,was gained as feed for the following chromatographic separation. 100 [g] of this middle concentrate was processed continuously by the the New JO Chromatographic Separation System
| Adsorbent: Chemically modificated silica gel (ODS silica gel) |
| Desorbent: Methanol |
| Desorbent Flow Rate: 260 [ml/l-R/h] |
| Middle Concentrate Supply Rate: 10 [ml/l-R/h] |
| Columns: 20 [mm] ID * 500 [mm]H * 8 columns |
| Results, Purity 95.3 [%] |
| DHA ethylester 47 [g] (33 [%] overall recovery rate of DHA ethylester) was obtained in eight hours. |
If the above results are compared with those of the conventional fixed-bed mode chromatographic device, in the case of raising the concentrating a 1 [Kg] middle concentration material, the time required is reduced to nearly a third, from 250 hours to 80 hours, and the volume of desorbent used is reduced to 1/46th, from 1200 [l] to 26 [l]. High purity DHA ethylester (with low usage of desorbent) can clearly be produced at a lower cost and higher speed than with the conventional method.
ORGANO: Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 218091 (1996)