Separation and purification of fructooligosaccharides on a zeolite fixed‐bed column

Fructooligosaccharides (FOS), a well‐known prebiotic product, are obtained by enzymatic synthesis and consist of a mixture of mono‐ and disaccharides. In this work, a methodology for their separation and purification was developed using a zeolite fixed‐bed column. The effects of column temperature (40–60°C), eluent flow rate (0.10–0.14 mL/min), injected to bed volume percent ratio (2.6–5.1%), and ethanol concentration in the eluent (40–60%, v/v) were investigated using a fractionary factorial design (2 4–1 ), having the separation efficiency and purity as target responses. Additional experiments were performed as well, where the temperature and ethanol concentration were studied in a central composite design (2 2 ). In this work, the zeolite fixed‐bed column was shown to be a good alternative for FOS purification, allowing a FOS purity of 90% and separation efficiency of 6.86 between FOS and glucose, using an eluent at 45°C with 60% ethanol concentration.