Preface

Process intensification and membranes will play an important role to match the future challenges of agro-food production processes. One of the techniques to intensify processes by target enhancement is the integration of membranes into processing in order to exploit the interesting specific membrane operation properties. This book aims to provide some relevant examples of integrated membrane operations in agro-food productions highlighting their contribution for an industrial sustainable growth in this area in terms of energy consumption, reduction of environmental impact and product quality. Each chapter reports successful examples of integrated membrane processes in different agro-food sectors including selected information on basic principles of membrane unit operations, commercial applications and an overview of current research and development.