Innovation functional excellence

The emergence of bioactive food compounds (neutraceuticals) with health benefits provides an excellent opportunity to improve pubUc health. The incorporation of bioactive compounds, such as peptides and vitamins, into food systems holds much promise in the development of innovative functional foods that may have physiological benefits or reduce the risk of diseases. Compared to pharmaceutical applications, little work has been done on the encapsulation properties of chitosan nanoparticles for the oral administration of neutraceuticals in healthy food. More recently, chitosan has been identified as a versatile biopolymer for a broad range of health and food applications because of its safety and nontoxicity in human beings. Because chitosan matrix is not stable at very low pH, modificatimis to the chitosan micro- or nanoparticles might be able to protect them. 

This involves the engineering of food powder ingredient particles that can maintain ingredient stability and functionality, that do not present dust formation problems, that do not present difficult handling and transport problems, and can be readily rehydrated to deliver their required functional performance in a wet formulation. The major limitation to this type of approach is the low value of food powders and the low cost driven nature of food powder product that stunts this type of innovation. On the other hand, particle engineering is the key to the higher added value of food powders, e g. by producing products with excellent instant properties. 

In order to construct artificial organs with an excellent function similar to the real biological organ, material innovation is urgently required, i.e., one should find a man-made soft and wet material as substitute for biotissue. Synthetic hydrogels, which consist of polymer networks swollen with large amounts of water (the same as biotissue), are the only candidates [5]. Different from biotissue, tlie water content... 

A major rapeseed cleaning innovation has recently been proved in practice and is now available to the industry. It consists of a single machine with air aspiration and only one moving element. It performs the functions of the former multiple units, requires less space, maintenance and surveillance. The quality of the product is excellent. 

The solubility of derivatives of CS has extended its utilization in noncovalent functionalization of CNTs to improve the properties of CNTs by making them individually dispersible. It has been reported that carboxymethyl CS was able to produce CNT dispersion in acidic media. On the other hand, PEG-functionalized carboxymethyl CS was found as an excellent candidate to produce highly effective debundUng and dispersion of CNTs in neutral aqueous solution [91], In an innovative method, the interaction between the functional groups of CS and CNTs was considered and the dispersibihty of CNTs was studied by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy (Fig. 2.13). The authors found that the free electron pair of amine group of carboxymethyl CS and PEG-functionalized carboxymethyl CS plays a crucial role in dispersing CNTs via n-% interactions. 

Chapter 4 introduces innovative methods to improve NF performance and starts with an excellent introduction to membrane materials in general, which we draw the readers attention to. The discussion is then extended to argue the benefits of using polyelectrolytes to overcome some of the problems associated with manbrane separation as discussed above. The chapter covers the different methods to functionalize the membrane surface with polyelectrolytes UV-grafting, chemical cross-linking static self-adsorption, and dynamic self-adsorption. Polyelectrolytes offer a new solution to improve NF membrane performance through simple procedures with minimal resource requirements when compared to other modification or fabrication methods. 

---