The 2 Questions To Answer Before Scaling Up your Magnetic Separation Rack

Do you want to learn how to take the most of your magnetic separation rack? Keep reading!

This post is about biomagnetic separation with a magnetic separation rack, and how to scale-up this process. If you are interested in this topic, download our free ebook The Basic Guide to Scale-up Biomagnetic Separation Processes:

Scaling up a biomagnetic separation process without understanding the parameters of the process will lead to problems that cause the company to lose money and increase the product’s time to market. Before scaling up any type of production process, it is important to know what parameters are relevant and important to the process itself so that you know which parameters you need to change or scale up.

For biomagnetic separation processes, the beads move because of the magnetic force which opposes the viscosity (i.e. drag force) of the buffer. Since the viscosity is well defined by the buffer, the key parameter is the magnetic force. So instead of trying to reproduce the same magnetic field for a scaling up process, you need to reproduce the same magnetic force.

2 questions to answer before scaling up

The magnetic force depends on the change of the magnetic field over a distance (gradient of the magnetic field) and on the magnetization of the magnetic beads (magnetic charge). Therefore the two basic questions that one needs to answer before scaling up the process are as follows:

1. What is the state of the beads? Are the beads magnetically saturated with a fixed magnetic moment or do they have a constant susceptibility?

2. What is the variation of the magnetic field on the working volume?

Unfortunately, if you are using a non-homogeneous biomagnetic separation system, it is very difficult to obtain a clear answer for these two questions. If you cannot clearly define the above parameters of the process, the scale-up is more likely to fail. A homogeneous system with homogeneous magnetic force is straightforward to scale up because the magnetic force is already well-defined.

Don't forget to check these posts from our blog in order to get a deeper insight into the scaling-up of biomagnetic separation processes:

• 4 usual problems when configuring a large volume processing system
• Why can't you simply use a Bigger Magnet to Scale-Up Biomagnetic Separation Processes?
• Why Do Larger Batches Not Have the Same Characteristics as Smaller Batches?