Industrial Processing
USE OF ENZYMES IN INDUSTRIAL PROCESSING IS BOTH : "ECOLOGICALLY OF VALUE" AND "HIGH TECH"
Many technical processes can be improved by use of enzymes to be more efficient and to avoid environmental pollution by reducing hazardous aggressive chemicals. Therefore this applications cannot stringently differentiated by those technical processes listed in the application area ENVIRONMENTAL TECHNOLOGIES. The major difference is that technical processes already established with certain market volumes are compiled in INDUSTRIAL PROCESSING. In this application area use of enzymes is focussed on improving processes in respect to efficiency and the environmental aspect is an important but not decisive side effect.
Economically most important and already established technical processes can be divided into mayor subareas of fields Food Processing and Feed Processing as well as the subarea of Fiber Processing integrating the fields Raw Fiber-, Textile-, and Leather Processing.
There is a broad scale of enzymes applied for improvement of product properties of nutrients reaching from simple modification of food for improvement of physico-chemical parameters without changing nutritional value sometimes leading to totally new product properties.
But there are also modifications of economic value by simple food processing procedures using enzymes for changing FOOD and FEED properties by increasing nutritional value of Malt Beverage, Bakery Dairy, Milk, Cheese Meat Fruit.
In principle industrial processing of food and feed from the view of nutritional improvement is independent from the qualitative improvement by adding Digestive Aids and Food Enhancers but in some applications use of enzymes for this purpose has industrial dimensions and is listed here.
Food & Agro Analytics is another application field where industrial scale procedures are analysed in respect of efficiency of enzymatic reactions and change of composition.
Processing of Fluids or generation of fluids by hydrolytic reactions is a field of high diversity and different applications can be classified in different application areas like technical processing or environmental technologies or in application fields like food Technical Processing.The effects of such an enzymatic treatment are reduction of viscosity, degradation of floating particles or enzymatic-chemical conversion of molecules e.g. detoxification. These applications are mostly realized in Industrial Processing like removing fruit juice cloudiness by Pectinase or removing protein from fluids e.g. Chymotrypsin mediated clotting of milk proteins (albumin) or removing contaminating protein from DNA-preparations in Molecular Biology.
In principle Fiber Processing is an umbrella term for any enzyme based technology where fibers irrespectively of herbal or animal origin are processed for improving any property of further processing. Each of the following processing technology domains is an independent industrial branch.
In INDUSTRIAL PROCESSING applications of a variety of different enzyme activities are used.
The most important enzymes for Technical Processing textile procedures are Proteases, Lipases, Amylases, Glucanases, Cellulases, but other more specific enzymes have considerable potential also to be used for highly specialized tasks in Technical Processing like Catalase or other Oxidorductases e.g. in enzymatical bleaching or in hydroxylizing and solubilizing contaminating substances.