Chromatography Scale-up: Don't Get Tied Down By Bed Height

By Kerstin Erickson, Senior System Engineer at Cytiva

Goodbye bed height, hello bed volume

Keeping a constant residence time is a well-established strategy when scaling up a chromatography step. Typically, this is achieved by keeping the bed height and linear flow velocity constant. But aiming for a constant bed height throughout scales has a limitation—you need an exact chromatography column size that fits the purpose.

If the column is too small, you waste time by cycling it several times to reach the desired output. If the column is too big, you don’t use all the capacity you have and waste resin. So, I offer you an industry hack: standardize across scales to constant column volumes per hour (CV/h) instead.