What is it about?
Membrane distillation (MD) and its variants, Osmotic Membrane Distillation (OMD) is an important downstream process in biotechnology and food engineering which makes use of hydrophobic membranes to separate volatile liquids and/or liquid vapor from solutes present in a biological or food medium. It uses a temperature or an osmotic pressure differential between feed and permeate sides of the membrane to remove a volatile vapor phase from the feed. It finds use in concentration and recovery of products such as solvents (ethanol, acetone, ethyl acetate, etc), colors (water soluble colors and pigments), water (concentration of juices, beverages etc). It is unaffected by traditional membrane problems such as concentration polarization and large solute concentrations.
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Why is it important?
It is of importance since it offers a less energy intensive alternatives to traditional distillation (because of higher vapor space and smaller footprint) and reverse osmosis (because it is unaffected by osmotic pressure in case of MD).
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This page is a summary of: Membrane Distillation and Osmotic Membrane Distillation in Downstream Processing, Current Biochemical Engineering, August 2015, Bentham Science Publishers,
DOI: 10.2174/2212711902999150730160949.
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