Chemical production processes which use biosynthetic pathways typically experience variations in the concentration and composition of impurities contained in the products, due to the natural variability of biological behaviour. As a result, downstream processes which use these biosynthetic chemical products need to be quite flexible with respect to the impurity concentrations. In this study, a ternary semicontinuous distillation process is investigated, separating a mixture into three fractions, as a potential candidate for the purification of three different bio-based chemicals (bio-acrylic acid, bio-n-butanol, and bio-n-butyl acrylate) which are generated at various steps in the process to produce bio-n-butyl acrylate from bio-based feedstocks. In this model-based investigation, the performance of this approach is discussed in terms of the energy demand, product loss, and the cycle time. It is shown, that a single ternary semicontinuous system can be applied to purify several bio-based chemicals, allowing a simple increase or decrease of the desired final purity, while being able to handle natural variations of the initial compositions of the feed. (c) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.