April 18, 1998
Contact: Marianne Ward Phone: (573) 341-4328 E-mail: [email protected]
BUBBLE SEPARATION PROCESS REMOVES CHEMICAL IMPURITIES
ROLLA, Mo. -- The adage that "oil and water don't mix" forms the basis for a newly patented bubble separation process that removes impurities from medicines and agricultural chemicals.
The process, developed by Dr. Dan Armstrong, Curators' Professor of chemistry at the University of Missouri-Rolla, enhances the concentration of the "good" qualities of medicines and agricultural chemicals and removes some unwanted impurities.
The process would work best for large-scale pharmaceutical and agricultural operations, "and the best part is that it is cheap and easy to use, and can operate in a continuous fashion," says Armstrong, who patented the process through the University of Missouri.
The bubble process works for the same reason that water and oil don't mix.
"Air, it turns out, is more hydrophobic -- like oil -- than it is like water," Armstrong says. "If you bubble air through water, oil-like substances will stick to the bubbles and be carried to the surface. Bubbles are interesting things."
Armstrong is known for developing patented Chirobiotic columns that remove unwanted side effects from medicines, food additives and pesticides. His columns use a special class of antibiotics to separate a desired drug or chemical from its mirror- image or chiral impurity. This process results in drugs that are safer and have fewer side effects. He applied the same basic separation principles in developing the bubble separation process.
"We wondered if bubbles could be used to separate these mirror image -- or left- and right-handed -- compounds," Armstrong says. "No one had ever tried it before. We didn't have a proposal or funding. We were just curious to see if it would work."
Mike Myers, a glassblower in UMR's chemistry department, built a glass tube and put a little frit (a component of porous glass) in the bottom. "We packed it with glass beads," Armstrong says. Outside air was blown into the base and bubbled through a solution containing a chiral foaming agent. A 50-50 mixture of left- and right-handed compounds then went into the bubble separation system.
"When we scraped the foam off the top, lo and behold, one isomer (of the left- or right-handed compounds) was enriched over the other," Armstrong says.
An enrichment means that there was more of one chiral compound than the other. "It's not a 100 percent pure separation, but because it is cheap, easy and can work with tons of a product, it may have commercial applications," Armstrong says.
Patents often take more than year to receive; however, this one took only months. "This one was very easy to patent because it's the first time bubble separation has been used for something like this," Armstrong says.
Armstrong has received numerous international awards, including a 1996 R&D 100 award, dubbed "The Oscars of Inventions" by the Chicago Tribune, and a 1995 Perkin Elmer Prize, an international award in the field of separations. He has given more than 200 invited plenary and keynote lectures worldwide. He also has received several outstanding teaching awards at UMR. In addition, Armstrong co-hosts the popular radio show, "We're Science," which is produced at UMR's public radio station KUMR, and is broadcast on more than 100 public radio stations and the Armed Forces Radio Network.
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