Engineering aspects of membrane bioreactors

This chapter describes membrane bioreactors from an engineering point of view. A membrane bioreactor can be defined as a unit operation or a piece of chemical equipment that combines a biocatalyst-filled reaction chamber with a membrane system for the purposes of adding reactants or removing products from a reaction. The basic principles of bioconversion, bioreactors and biocatalysis are introduced, together with a description of the most important biocatalyst immobilization techniques. The mass transfer phenomena involved in membrane systems are discussed along with some representative configurations of membrane bioreactors, whose behaviour can be described using a simple mathematical approach. For all the aforementioned systems the most significant parameters have been defined to estimate the system performance.