These mono and disaccharides should be separated from FOS in order to maintain their prebiotic function (Gramblicka & Polakovic, 2007). The design of an industrial-scale separation process based on adsorption includes the selection of suitable adsorbent materials, and knowledge of adsorption equilibrium of individual compounds of the feed stream (Gramblicka & Polakovic, 2007). Recent works in adsorption process technologies have proposed resins or zeolites for carbohydrate

separation. Many researchers have studied zeolites, focusing mostly on zeolites X and Y, using chromatographic methods. NaX was reported to be glucose selleck kinase inhibitor selective, KX and certain cationic forms of Y (Ca-, K-, and Sr-) were found to be

fructose selective (Hammoudi et al., 2008 and Heper et al., 2007). In the literature there are not many studies that reported the purification of fructooligosaccharides, so this work is to contribute toward the knowledge of adsorption parameters of some sugars, mainly fructooligosaccharides. Besides, the application of adsorbents such as zeolites which are not usually applied in purification and separation of sugars. Regarding the use of zeolites to recover mono and disaccharides from enzymatic synthesis of FOS, it is interesting to determine the kinetic Palbociclib purchase and thermodynamic properties of the system. The equilibrium data, film mass transfer coefficient and intraparticle diffusivity are important parameters to be considered in selection and optimization of a purification process since they determine the range in which the sorption step can be carried out to ensure a good performance of the equipment, and give support to the process scale-up. The usefulness and confidence of the kinetic and mass transfer parameters are dependent on the estimation quality. The use of empirical correlations to estimate mass transport parameters impose restrictions to the model, since its predictions are validated for

a narrow range of independent variables, implicating in unsatisfactory estimation of model parameters. Regarding the equilibrium parameters, it is preferable to estimate their values from process data instead of equilibrium Reverse transcriptase data because some imprecision during the estimation procedure probably will jeopardize the overall model performance (Burkert, Barbosa, Mazutti, & Maugeri, 2011). In the present work, adsorption experiments were carried out in a stirred tank reactor in order to evaluate the kinetics and mass transfer effects on a single component purification of glucose, fructose, sucrose and FOS using six cationic forms (Na+, Ca+2, Ba+2, Sr2+, K+ and Mg2+) of the X zeolite. A mathematical model was proposed taking into account the kinetic and mass transfer parameters. The adsorption rates and mass transfer resistances parameters involved in the process were used to evaluate the separation efficiency.