Natural product industries are one of the important industries that produce high-value-added chemicals from natural sources, which found applications in food, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals. There has been increase interest in the use of natural products. One reason is that they often contain desirable characteristics unmatched by their synthetic counterparts. Natural product processing is different from that of commodity chemicals, as characterized by some features. Natural products usually involve complex mixtures and molecules, for which little information is available on physicochemical properties and basic engineering information. Relatively immature unit operations such as chromatography and crystallization appear to be the key techniques. For these reasons, the development effort...[ Read more ]

Natural product industries are one of the important industries that produce high-value-added chemicals from natural sources, which found applications in food, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals. There has been increase interest in the use of natural products. One reason is that they often contain desirable characteristics unmatched by their synthetic counterparts. Natural product processing is different from that of commodity chemicals, as characterized by some features. Natural products usually involve complex mixtures and molecules, for which little information is available on physicochemical properties and basic engineering information. Relatively immature unit operations such as chromatography and crystallization appear to be the key techniques. For these reasons, the development effort is usually hindered by the increasing product and process complexity. On the other hand, with a rapidly changing market and a great deal of uncertainty in development, there is an intensifying pressure to reduce time-to-market and development cost.

It is therefore very important that the development of natural product manufacturing process be done quickly and effectively. To overcome such challenges, this dissertation presents a framework for systematic development of natural product manufacturing processes. Due to the broad scope of the subject, it is impossible that our contributions encompass all aspects of the development process. Instead, some selected key issues in the development of natural product manufacturing processes are emphasized. These key issues are centered on three main themes. First, a generalized framework for the manufacture of phytochemicals is developed. Second, we focus on the design of key techniques using liquid-liquid extraction and supercritical crystallization processes. Finally, we demonstrate the development of a more realistic design from a preliminary conceptual design using isoflavones and amino acids as model examples. The proposed framework makes use the experiment and process synthesis tools in an integrated manner to speed up process development and achieve the desired process objective.