Treating of Microorganisms

For the treatment of microorganisms, high-pressure technology offers two different processes  

Hydrostatic high-pressure process up to 4000 bar, which is discussed in Chapter 9. And as an alternative, microorganisms are processed with supercritical fluids. 

The idea to use CO2 as the supercritical fluid for inactivation of bacteria is already quite old. The first more successful results were published in 1987 [58] describing the 

It was found that bacterial inactivation is achieved by CO2 adsorption in the liquid phase, although the detailed procedure of the inactivation is not dean 

Finally, the intensive investigations in the past 10 years led supercritical CO2 treatment of food to a promising stage by achieving cold pasteurization and/or sterilization of liquids. Now much more knowledge about the mechanisms of microbial inactivation is available. 

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