(31b) High Power Ultrasonics In the Chemical, Food & Bio Industry: From Laboratory to Commercial Production

High power ultrasound has only recently become an efficient tool for large scale commercial food and non-food applications, such as extraction, emulsification, homogenization, crystallization, dewatering, low temperature pasteurization, degassing, defoaming, activation and inactivation of enzymes, milling and viscosity reduction. More recently, researchers have started to explore the technology for its ability to provide unique product functionality. High power ultrasound is not only safe and environmentally friendly in its application, but efficient and economical as well. This can be attributed to improved equipment design and higher efficiencies of large-scale continuous flow-through systems. It offers a number of advantages over other conventional technologies including low energy and maintenance costs, and equipment that is robust and durable which can generally be retrofitted into existing facilities due to the relative small size. Like most innovative processing technologies, high power ultrasonics is not an off-the-shelf technology and therefore needs to be developed and scaled up for each application (for example using a Stage-Gate approach). This implies that the process from concept testing to commercial launch can take up to several years and involves collaboration between vendors, institutes or experts in the field. The advantage however, is that the specific design and application can often be kept as trade-secret or protected through patents or exclusivity agreements. The objective of the present paper is to present examples of ultrasonic applications that have made it to commercialization, its underlying fundamental mechanism, and to share some key learning's involving scale-up of an innovative process technology in general.