Low-cost membrane technology has been created by a researcher from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.
This low-cost technology can generate psychoactive drugs and anti-ageing compounds from a vast range of agricultural resources like Camellia Sinensis, citrus fruits and peels especially orange peels, berries, ginkgo biloba, parsley, pulses, tea, sea buckthorn and onions.
Mihir Kumar Purkait, head, Centre for the Environment, and Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT Guwahati along with his M Tech student V L Dhadge have developed the low-cost technology together and also patented it.
The low-cost technology does not use any expensive organic solvents, and only utilizes water. The processing cost and price of pharmaceuticals therefore are much cheaper than that of existing solvent-based separation techniques.
Purkait while explaining the procedure on how the technology works said, “The developed technology is exclusively pore/particle-size based pressure-driven membrane separation process. The water extracts of the mentioned plants/fruits/leaves at optimum operating conditions are passed through specially made cascade membrane units of fabricated with appropriate molecular weight cut off (MWCO) membranes capable of separating targeted flavonoids selectively. Permeate and retentive part from appropriate membrane unit is then fridge dried to get the powdered product. We have synthesized stimuli-responsive smart membrane for the selective separation and purification of targeted compounds from the mixture of plants or leaves or fruits extracted in simple water”.
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The technology uses organic solvents, so it suffers from various setbacks such as low product quality and yield. The processing requires a high operating system and product cost. It is a time consuming and high energy-intensive process for solvent recovery and has limitations to run in continuation mode in industrial scale.
The commercially available techniques use expensive organic solvents like chloroform, acetone, acetonitrile etc. that ultimately increases the price of the antioxidant.