Autonomous Control and Dynamics Simulation of a 3-Stages Countercurrent Liquid-Liquid Extraction: Trimetozine Purification as a Case Study

Liquid-liquid extraction is a technique of extraction heavily used in chemical industry and especially for purification of pharmaceuticals. Trimetozine was used as a case study to test the performance of an implemented platform capable of conducting the extraction of the analyte of interest from its impurities using a washing solvent. Three stages of pairs of mix-er-settler were designed for a full control of the streams flow rates, the temperature, and the speed of stirring. The countercurrent extraction was chosen with an inline IR sensor as a Process Analytical Technology and a Partial Least Squares model to quantify the partitioning of the different analytes in the downstream of the platform. The dynamics of the extraction was followed experimentally and simulated in MATLAB in order to build black-box model.