Modelling of the rinsing of a Fixed Bed Reactor for Solid Phase Peptide Synthesis using COMSOL Multiphysics®

Solid Phase Peptide Synthesis (SPPS) requires finely designed reactor. While the process itself is tuned during a lab-scale procedure, the scale-up to production size reactor opens new challenges. The efficiency of the reaction and the quality of the final substance can be made like the lab-scale results, but it requires to master the critical scale up parameters.

In this study, the process design is secured by using a numerical model. The fluid flow in the whole reactor and more specifically in the fixed resin bed during the draining steps is modelled in a realistic way through Brinkman equation and the appropriate boundary conditions. Using this computed fluid flow, the rinsing of the reactor can be studied by modelling the reagents to eliminate with particles whose trajectories are driven by the previously computed fluid flow.