ABSTRACT
Membrane processes, mainly membrane filtration, from microfiltration to reverse osmosis, have nowadays penetrated almost all the sectors of the food industry, significantly modifying the processing schemes and the products themselves. Beyond the pioneer dairy industry, where membranes have led to a real cracking of milk and whey into a multiplicity of compounds or functional fractions, this chapter intends to review the main current and potential applications of these technologies. Together with whey, the milk industry is also a pioneer in ingredient fractionation by membrane technologies. A number of different fractions and ingredients can be obtained by pressure-driven membrane technologies from whole milk. Membranes fundamentally split the feed into two fluxes, retentate and permeate, according to the size of the solutes, with a possible modulation by electrostatic or physical-chemical interactions. Depending on the targeted output, membranes can ensure purification, concentration/extraction, and separation or fractionation.
