The action or process of regaining the possession of the lost value of a product. Learn more in: Remanufacturing, an Added Value Product Recovery Strategy.
Product recovery cost mainly guides the cost of the product in the market. More investment towards product recovery increases the cost of the product in the market. Even purity of the product and intended use of the product will increase the investment towards product recovery and purification. Various techniques involved in product recovery are filtration, centrifugation, precipitation, dialysis, solvent extraction, chromatographic and electrophoretic techniques, crystallization techniques etc. As we get our resultant filtrate, then this filtrate is subjected for the rest of the purification process. Sometimes the investment we put towards purification also depends on, whether the product needs to be partially purified or completely purified.
The product recovery unit operations and their combination is not a recent innovation, but has accompanied the history of product recovery since the nineteenth century. Although educt–product or product–side product separation would not need to be performed, real bioprocesses may not go to complete conversion and may also utilize educt mixtures. Therefore, product recovery and purification remain key determinants of the viability of a whole bioprocess. This article provides an introduction to product recovery and some of its historical backgrounds. The integral view on product recovery is based on the modular operations of recovery of solids and liquids, cell treatment, solvent extraction, liquid–liquid phase separation, crystallization and precipitation, adsorption, distillation, chromatography, and membrane filtration. The scalability, yield per step, and number of unit operations in downstream processing are key factors to the economics of product recovery. The replacement of multiple downstream processing steps by the integration of single steps within downstream processing and with the reaction can therefore improve overall operational efficiency.