Transport phenomena in foam fractionation

泡沫分离在矿物和食品加工中有许多直接的应用，但它最令人兴奋的潜力是作为回收和提纯高价值生物表面活性剂的低成本替代品。这些是用来稳定生命系统界面的材料，可以用作抗生素和抗病毒药物。生物表面活性剂在界面上聚集的亲和力表明，泡沫分馏是浓缩有价值产品的理想过程。显然，一种具有成本效益和可靠的方法来丰富生物表面活性剂，将使它们的使用更具吸引力，并将产生更多新型生物材料的开发，如肽表面活性剂。

Foam fractionation has a number of immediate applications in mineral and food processing but its most exciting potential is as low cost alternative for recovering and purifying high value biosurfactants. These are materials used to stabilise interfaces in living systems, and can be used as antibiotics and antiviral agents. The affinity for biosurfactants to collect at an interface suggests that foam fractionation is an ideal process to concentrate valuable products. Clearly, a cost-effective and reliable method of enriching streams of biosurfactants will make their use even more attractive and will engender the development of more novel biomaterials, such as pepfactants.