Mild and energy-efficient compound recovery
About this expertise
In short- Recover more value
- Protect sensitive compounds
- Lower production costs
- Scale up
Compound recovery can represent for over 70% of production costs in food and biobased processes. We design and deliver mild, energy-efficient separation and purification technologies, and integrated process solutions. These preserve the quality of target compounds while reducing costs and waste.
For many producers in food, feed, and biobased industries, recovering valuable compounds from aqueous or solid streams is one of the biggest technical and economic hurdles. Conventional separation methods can be highly energy-intensive, drive up production costs, and comes with the risk of damaging sensitive compounds. We offer a wide portfolio of mild and efficient product recovery technologies, ranging from membrane technology and crystallization to chromatography and dry separations. Beyond these technologies, we develop integrated solutions that combine recovery and purification steps into scalable concepts tailored to industrial practice.
Our approach begins with the feedstock composition and desired product properties, selecting the most suitable separation principles (volatility, size, solubility, charge, or chemical affinity). Often, we use hybrid or cascaded systems to achieve the right performance.
Our expertise covers gas, liquid, and solid separations and is supported by facilities ranging from laboratory to demonstration scale. This enables us to support industrial partners reduce production costs, increase yields, and scale up circular, value-added processes that preserve product quality.
1. Gas separations
- Dehumidification and energy recovery from (hot, drying) air in membrane contactors
2. Liquids separations
- Food
- Sugar recovery from biobased streams with anti-solvent crystallization
- Recovery of nutrients, salts and acids with electro-membrane separations
- Biobased industries
- NH3 recovery from waste waters with trans-membrane chemisorption and electro-membrane technologies
- Phosphate recovery with magnetic adsorption-desorption technologies
- Brine valorization and treatment for salt recovery and water production with membrane distillation crystallization
- Mining industries
- Isolation of valuable metals from industrial waste waters, etc.
3. Solid separations
- Used for pulses and grains, under investigation for other biomasses
- Fractionation of proteins from starch, fibre, or ash
- Product application as food ingredient
- Gas separations (aeration/deaeration, drying, humidification)
- Liquid separations
- Product concentration and dewatering: UF/NF/RO/MD/OD/FO
- Product isolation:
- Membrane distillation, pervaporation and gas permeation
- Membrane extraction (pertraction, emulsion pertraction)
- Electro-membrane technologies (ED, EDBM, CDI, EDI, etc.)
- Crystallisation
- Chromatography
- Magnetic adsorption-desorption
- Dry separations
- Air classification
- Electrostatic separation
Get in touch with our expert
Get in touch with Tania Mubita Zambrano, expertise leader, for more information.
TM (Tania) Mubita Zambrano, PhD
WR Onderzoeker