Electrophoretic Membrane Contactors

In electrophoretic membrane contactors, a porous membrane is used to put into contact two flowing liquids, between which a mass transfer takes place. The driving force is an electrical field applied in a direction perpendicular to the fluid flow. Such systems should offer the possibility to scale up electrophoresis technologies, since the separation is achieved with respect to the electrophoretic mass transfer of the solute. On the other hand, since a porous membrane is used instead of an ion exchange one, one can expect to open the field of application of electrodialysis to fractionate polyamino acids, peptides or small proteins for instance. This paper gives a review of the different studies devoted to electrophoretic membrane contactors. This review discuss the main results coming form the two different and complementary approaches used, i.e., that based on application on one hand and that based on the investigation of mass transfer on the other hand.