Expanded bed adsorption (EBA) is an integrative unit operation for the primary recovery ofbioproducts from crude feedstock. Biomass electrostatic adhesion often leads to bad bed stabilityand low adsorption capacity. The results indicate that effective cell disruption is a potentialapproach to reduce the biomass adhesion during anion-exchange EBA. Two common celldisruption methods (sonication treatment and high-pressure disruption with a French press) wereinvestigated in the present work. The mean size of cell debris reduced dramatically during thecell disruption process, and the absolute value of the
![](/images/gifchars/zeta.gif)
potential of cell debris also decreasedsignificantly as the mean size reduced. The biomass transmission
index (BTI) obtained throughthe biomass pulse response experiment was used to quantitatively evaluate the biomass-adsorbentinteraction. Combining the influences of
![](/images/gifchars/zeta.gif)
potential of adsorbent (
A),
![](/images/gifchars/zeta.gif)
potential of biomass(
B), and biomass mean size (
dB), the parameter of (-
A·
B·
dB) was explored as a reasonableindicator of biomass adhesion in expanded
beds. A good linear correlation was confirmed betweenBTI and (-
A·
B·
dB) for all biomass and cell disruption conditions tested, which was independentof the cell disruption methods. A target parameter (-
A·
B·
dB) of 120 mV
2![](/images/entities/mgr.gif)
m was derived forBTI above 0.9, which meant a very slight influence of biomass on the stability of the expandedbed. This criterion could be used as a rational control target for cell disruption processes inEBA applications.