Membrane-based separation in flow analysis for environmental and food applications

Membrane-based separation techniques have been used as an efficient process for analyte separation or enrichment and matrix removal. By coupling these techniques to flow-based analysis, sample preparation and analyte detection can be automated and miniaturized. Different membrane separation techniques are available but the most used in flow analysis are gas diffusion, dialysis, supported liquid membranes and polymer inclusion membranes. The current state of the art of membrane-based separations hyphenated with flow techniques is presented along with a discussion of the applications to environmental and food analysis. Moreover, a brief description of gas diffusion, dialysis and membrane extraction techniques is also included.