Through this newly developed method, the particularly energy-consuming and resource-intensive processing during the production of enzymes becomes clearly more ecological. The cover layer structure (»filter cake«), that lowers the filtrate performance during the static membrane filtration, is reduced through an electric field and increases the performance of the filtration as also its selectivity: when separating an active enzyme from hardly filterable biomass, the yield was increased by 50 percent. With the separation of two model enzymes from each other, the filtrate stream was increased five times that much and the selectivity clearly improved. Compared with the plate electro filtration, the energy need was reduced significantly during the construction of an electro candle filter.

Electro candle filter
On the basis of the high product concen­tration of these enzymes to be purified in the filtered solution, a further energy-intensive evaporating of the filtrate is superfluous in most cases. The press electrofiltration developed by the Bioprocess Engineering group of the University Karlsruhe together with Lenser Filtration GmbH & Co. KG often leads to a sufficient purity of the product and makes time-consuming and resource-intensive chromatography steps unnecessary.