Integration of Pervaporation Units in the Production of APIs and Intermediates

Pervaporation is a sophisticated separation method that uses dense polymeric and/or ceramic membranes to isolate one of more components from relatively complex mixtures. This technology offers several advantages over traditional distillation techniques over traditional distillation techniques such as better selectivity, lower energy consumption, azeotrope separation, and modular design. Moreover, pervaporation systems can be considered as green processing practices and they can be integrated to flow configurations. Since it is a diffusion-controlled process, it becomes cost-effective only when the species to be permeated are minor components in the feed. Particularly, in Pharmaceutical Industry, pervaporation systems can be used to remove undesired moisture from reactions matrixes, super-saturate solutions to control crystallizations, dehydrate streams for solvent recovery, remove volatile organic compounds from waste streams, etc.

In this work, two different pervaporation units (PVM-035 and PVM-043, Pervatech) containing ceramic membranes (ceramic-HybSi internal layer) were used to investigate dehydration of organic solvents commonly used in the pharmaceutical industry (e.g., acetone, acetonitrile, methanol, propanol, . Integration of this unit to other unit operations (reactions) was also investigated.