D. Leo Pyle – författare

Industrial food processing involves the production of added value foods on a large scale; these foods are made by mixing and processing different ingredients in a prescribed way. The food industry, historically, has not designed its processes in an engineering sense, i.e. by understanding the physical and chemical principles which govern the operation of the plant and then using those principles to develop a process. Rather, processes have been 'designed' by purchasing equipment from a range of suppliers and then connecting that equipment together to form a complete process. When the process being run has essentially been scaled up from the kitchen then this may not matter. However, there are limits to the approach. • As the industry becomes more sophisticated, and economies of scale are exploited, then the size of plant reaches a scale where systematic design techniques are needed. • The range of processes and products made by the food industry has increased to include foods which have no kitchen counterpart, such as low-fat spreads. • It is vital to ensure the quality and safety of the product. • Plant must be flexible and able to cope with the need to make a variety of products from a range of ingredients. This is especially important as markets evolve with time. • The traditional design process cannot readily handle multi-product and multi-stream operations. • Processes must be energetically efficient and meet modern environmen­ tal standards.

Industrial food processing involves the production of added value foods on a large scale; these foods are made by mixing and processing different ingredients in a prescribed way. The food industry, historically, has not designed its processes in an engineering sense, i.e. by understanding the physical and chemical principles which govern the operation of the plant and then using those principles to develop a process. Rather, processes have been ''designed'' by purchasing equipment from a range of suppliers and then connecting that equipment together to form a complete process. When the process being run has essentially been scaled up from the kitchen then this may not matter. However, there are limits to the approach. • As the industry becomes more sophisticated, and economies of scale are exploited, then the size of plant reaches a scale where systematic design techniques are needed. • The range of processes and products made by the food industry has increased to include foods which have no kitchen counterpart, such as low-fat spreads. • It is vital to ensure the quality and safety of the product. • Plant must be flexible and able to cope with the need to make a variety of products from a range of ingredients. This is especially important as markets evolve with time. • The traditional design process cannot readily handle multi-product and multi-stream operations. • Processes must be energetically efficient and meet modern environmen­ tal standards.

The challenge of bioseparations is to isolate and purify identified products from the dilute product broth produced from cell culture. Innovation in bioseparations technology is increasingly driven by the requirements imposed by the growing importance of production on a process scale of injectable-grade products, and economic pressures to improve the efficiency of downstream processing. As in other areas of technical change, science does not necessarily precede new technology: progress results from a complex and messy mixture of advances in understanding, ingenious ideas, novel techniques and chance discoveries. What is certain is that close interaction between academics and practitioners, biological scientists and process engineers is needed to solve the problems of bioseparations. The Second International Conference on Separations for Biotechnology at Reading, UK, in September 1990 set out to provide a critical multidisciplinary forum for the discussion of bioseparations. This volume contains the papers presented at the meeting. The meeting was organised around six themes with oral and poster presentations on the science and practice of bioseparations technology, and the same structure has been kept for this book. We have also included the texts of the keynote review paper by Professor Alan Michaels and the introductory review papers specially commissioned for the conference. Within each part of this book the review paper is followed by the contributed papers grouped alphabetically by their first author. All the original papers published here were accepted for publication after scientific refereeing.