The purpose of the traditional Chinese medicine extraction process is to leach the medicinal essence components from the medicinal materials, enabling them to fully dissolve in the solvent system. However, the composition of traditional Chinese medicine is complex. During the leaching process, both medicinal and non-medicinal components are extracted, resulting in turbid filtrate with sediment, low clarity, and test results showing low content of effective components and high impurity content. Therefore, the extract must undergo a series of separation and purification processes in the later stage to isolate the effective components separately while removing useless macromolecules or harmful components.
Traditional extraction processes for Chinese herbal medicines generally involve water extraction and alcohol precipitation or alcohol extraction and water precipitation. These methods have many drawbacks, such as complicated procedures, high labor costs, high energy consumption during the process, and low final product quality. To improve production efficiency, enhance product quality, and achieve energy savings and consumption reduction, many botanical extract and pharmaceutical companies have introduced advanced membrane separation systems for the filtration and refinement of Chinese medicine extracts, physical concentration, dehydration or de-alcoholization, decolorization, and other processes. Membrane separation technology is a high-precision, physical separation process that performs molecular sieving of Chinese medicine extracts at the molecular level, screening out and enriching effective components while removing useless ones, significantly improving the final product quality.
Additionally, membrane separation equipment operates at low temperatures, making it suitable for the separation, classification, concentration, and enrichment of heat-sensitive substances;it requires no additional substances, saving resources and protecting the environment;it has high selectivity, with high recovery rates of active ingredients and high removal rates of non-active ingredients;it achieves simultaneous separation and concentration, with high concentration rates.
