Abstract:

BACKGROUND: In recent years, with the development of biomaterials, microfiltration membrane has been gradually instead of various traditional filtering techniques and become a indispensable way to ensure product quality in modern industry, especially high-grade, advanced technology industries, such as electronics, pharmaceuticals, scientific research and quality testing. The development of modern biotechnology and the pharmaceutical industry accelerates the development of membrane technology.
OBJECTIVE: To review the separation principle, characteristics, and types of microfiltration membranes and to introduce the development and application of microfiltration membrane in various fields.
METHODS: A retrieve of CNKI and PubMed were performed by the fist author to search articles about microfiltration membrane materials and techniques published from January 1994 to December 2010 by using the keywords of “microfiltration technique, microfiltration membrane, biomaterial” in Chinese and English. Repetitive articles were removed. Among 60 retrieved articles, 27 were included in result analysis, including 25 Chinese articles and 2 English.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Microfiltration, also known as microporous filtration, belongs to delicate filtration, which can filter micron or nanoparticles and bacteria. The basic principle is based on different membrane pore size or molecular mass trapped, and the membranes can be classified as microfiltration membrane, ultrafiltration membrane, nanofiltration membrane and reverse osmosis membrane. Currently, the microfiltration technique is popular in every field, but membrane fouling, plugging, high viscosity of liquid material influence the rapid development of microfiltration membrane. The key to achieve the large-scale application of biological product purification depends on the studies on the mechanism of membrane fouling and anti-pollution film materials, and so on. In the future, a cooperative development among a variety of membrane separation techniques, such as ultrafiltration, nanofiltration and microfiltration will be realized, and the implementation of multi-stage separation is the developmental trend.