Tubular Continuous Crystallizer with Flow Reversal Design and Its Effect on Lysozyme Crystal Particle Size

A vertical-plane spiral tube crystallizer with different designs was used for the continuous crystallization of magnetic core lysozyme (M-Lys) crystals. Experiments and CFD simulations were performed to optimize the process. The results show that flow reversal in the crystallizer structure and secondary flow in the bent tube can effectively promote mixing within the tube, narrowing the particle size distribution of the crystals. A crystallizer structure with coils in a vertical plane and repeated type C unit between adjacent coils with a bending diameter of 4 cm was demonstrated to produce magnetic core lysozyme crystals with a high yield, regular crystal morphology, and narrow size distribution. The yield increased from 55.87 to 74.21%. The result in this paper gives a new design and deep insight into a tubular continuous crystallizer that is probably used in protein crystallization.