Vision-Guided Automation Platform for Liquid–Liquid Extraction and Workup Development

Liquid–liquid extraction (LLE) screening can be a very labor-intensive exercise during commercial process development, particularly when workup challenges such as poor partitioning or emulsion formation arise. An automated platform for LLE has the potential to both accelerate process development and deliver a more optimized process, thereby reducing the burden on downstream purification requirements. To address this need, a fully automated liquid–liquid extraction workflow was designed and implemented to optimize extraction unit operations during process development. This workflow leverages commercially available hardware and software to perform extractions, identify phase boundaries, and prepare samples for analysis. A data visualization tool was also developed to streamline the processing of visual and quantitative data. Application of the automated LLE workflow on two case studies will be presented: one highlighting the development of an effective enzyme removal strategy for a biocatalytic cascade reaction and the other demonstrating the identification of operating parameters for workup of an intermediate with a tendency to partition into an oil layer.