Resins for Aqueous Applications

Materials overview

A selection of separation materials (resins / adsorbents) is provided with a variety of functionalities. All are multi-purpose materials and could be evaluated for a wide range of organic molecules.

The resins are available for fast and simple testing.

Typical properties of the resins are:

Cross-linking: moderate cross-linkage
Good swelling and accessibility in water
Porosity: gel-type / mesoporous – optimal for small molecules
Particle size distribution: ca 200 – 1200 µm

Resins have various backbone chemistries combined with a variety of different surface chemistries. The resin polarities span from hydrophobic reversed phase (RP) and medium hydrophobicity (MH) to polar ionic exchangers (IEX).

Typically, a starting point for exploratory screening evaluations could be a collection of appropriate resins as a kit. As for many unknown or new separation routes, it is advisable to evaluate a number of resins. This will enable a quick evaluation of the retention behaviour in the mixture – to either retain the target molecule or to remove undesired or disturbing compounds.

Application areas

The properties of the separation materials are aimed at retaining small organic molecules such as phytochemicals, active pharmaceutical ingredients, pharmaceutical builing blocks or its side products, environmental residues like pesticides or biogenic contaminants like natural toxins or antinutritionals and similar compounds.

For an application, a selection of the appropriate resins can be chosen for screening. The user must determine, if one of the separation materials is capable to solve their desired separation target under their conditions.

A representative screening result is shown in the graph displaying % binding of a target molecule to various resins.

Different resins with identical specifications can still have different selectivities or performance due to variations in resin architecture and functional positions.

With an identified resin, the customer can further optimize the process to 1) improve selective binding to separate/remove the target molecule or 2) to accomplish fractionation of the components to isolate the target molecule.