Nanofiltration membranes for food and pharmaceutical industries

Recently, among several pressure governed membrane procedures including reverse osmosis, microfiltration, nanofiltration (NF), and ultrafiltration, NF has attracted a lot of attention and provides important attributes such as lower practical pressure, lesser investment, high permeate flux, fixed costs, and higher retention of multivalent salts. NF membranes have been applied in several usages such as wastewater treatment, food, and pharmaceutical industries. Today, due to increasing energy costs, increasing demand for food products with higher nutritional value, and green processing methods, NF technology is used in this regard. In the food industry, promising utilizations of NF are related to juice concentration, beverage industry, dairy industry, whey processing, sugar industry, wastewater treatment, etc. On the other side, in the pharmaceutical industry, organic pollutants such as antibiotics and other drugs endanger the environment and interfere with public health. Therefore, it is important to remove these drug contaminants from the environment, and NF technology works well. NF shows promising results for the treatment of pharmaceutically active compounds and other emerging micro-pollutants. Keeping in mind the importance of NF technology in the pharmaceutical and food industries, this review will highlight the successes in the use of NF membranes in these industries.