prepLiLi: Industrial-Scale CPC for High-Volume Purification
prepLiLi is LiLiChro’s industrial centrifugal partition chromatography (CPC) system for continuous, high-volume purification. Designed for direct integration into production environments, it enables companies to transfer validated liquid–liquid separation methods from laboratory development to full industrial manufacturing.
The system represents the highest-capacity platform in the LiLiChro instrument range. It is intended for applications where laboratory and pilot-scale equipment can no longer provide the required throughput and where purification must become a reliable part of the production process.
Unlike conventional preparative chromatography, CPC does not use a packed solid stationary phase. One liquid phase is retained inside the rotating column by centrifugal force, while a second immiscible liquid phase flows through it. Compounds separate according to their different partition behaviour between the two phases.
Eliminating silica or another solid packing material reduces the risk of irreversible adsorption and removes the need to replace or repack large preparative columns. This can be particularly valuable at industrial scale, where stationary-phase consumption, column maintenance, product loss and downtime can become significant operating cost drivers.
prepLiLi features a 100L column volume and supports injected sample loads from 0.075kg to 7.5kg. The system operates with solvent consumption between 90L/h and 1,800L/h and flow rates from 1.5L/min to 30L/min. Its special Z-cell rotor design provides the separation capacity required for production-scale purification, with stationary-phase retention typically greater than 80%–90%.
The system is suitable for pharmaceutical, biotechnology, natural-extract, cosmetic and fine-chemical production. Potential applications include the purification of active pharmaceutical ingredients and intermediates, isolation of high-value natural compounds, removal of critical impurities, processing of complex botanical extracts and recovery of sensitive products that may be difficult to purify using conventional packed columns.
Each industrial purification project brings different requirements regarding feed composition, throughput, solvent handling, fraction collection and production infrastructure. For this reason, prepLiLi is implemented as a tailored production solution rather than simply supplied as a standalone laboratory instrument.
LiLiChro supports equipment configuration, installation and process integration to align the system with the planned production environment. If greater chromatographic capacity is required, the platform can be designed to meet the facility’s specific needs.
prepLiLi also completes LiLiChro’s scalable CPC development pathway. Initial feasibility and solvent-system screening can be performed on miniLiLi, followed by gram-scale preparation on midiLiLi and pilot production on maxiLiLi. The same biphasic solvent system and liquid–liquid partition principle can then be transferred to prepLiLi using straightforward scale-up principles.
This development route allows teams to validate the chemistry using smaller amounts of material before investing in industrial capacity. It reduces scale-up uncertainty and helps generate the process data required for production planning, economic assessment and implementation.
For companies ready to make CPC part of their manufacturing process, prepLiLi provides a scalable and configurable alternative to packed-column purification. It combines industrial throughput, liquid stationary-phase operation and professional process integration in a system built for high-volume production.
