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The processing of biochemicals and pharmaceuticals is just as important to Chemical Engineering today as petrochemical production and oil refining. Such processing involves operations such as crystallization, ultracentrifugation, membrane filtration, preparative chromatography and several others, all of which have in common the need to separate large from small molecules, or solid from liquid. In all cases, the separations are energy intensive because the desired products are by necessity present in low concentration in a (usually aqueous) solvent. 

Of these biological separation operations, crystallization is the most important from a tonnage standpoint; it is commonly employed in the pharmaceutical, chemical and food processing industries. Important biochemical examples include chiral separations (Wibowo et al., 2004), purification of antibiotics (Genck, 2004), separation of amino acids from precursors (Takamatsu and Ryu, 1988), and many other pharmaceutical (Wang and Berglund, 2000; Kim et al., 2003), food additive (Hussain et al., 2001; Gron et al., 2003) and agrochemical (Lewiner et al., 2002) purifications. The control of crystal morphology and size distribution is critical to overall process economics, as these factors determine the costs of downstream processing operations such as drying, filtration, and solids conveying. 

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