ABSTRACT
In recent years, membrane technology is gaining more importance in the various types of separation processes. Membrane technology plays a vital part in separation processes with less cost and energy consumption related to conventional methods. Recently, a good amount of work has been carried out to improve the performance of hollow fiber contactors (HFC). The challenges and evolving applications of HFC using microporous membranes in fermentation and enzymatic transformation and in chiral separation are discussed in this chapter. These membranes are acting as an interface between the two phases, which avoids the dispersion of one phase to another phase. The self-supporting character and increased surface area made the hollow fiber membranes superior to flat sheet membranes. This chapter describes the recent developments in hollow fiber membrane contactors for fermentation technology, enzyme transformation as well as the chiral separation of compounds.
