表面活性剂是具有高表面活性和乳化性能的化合物。这些化合物在食品中找到应用,medical,Pharmaceutical,和石油工业,在农业方面,生物修复,清洁,化妆品,和个人护理产品配方。由于它们的广泛使用和环境持久性,确保可生物降解性和可持续性是必要的,以免损害环境。生物表面活性剂,即,由木质纤维素原料生产的植物或微生物来源的表面活性剂,在净碳负的规模上,比他们的石化衍生对应物表现更好。虽然许多生物表面活性剂是市售的,它们的高生产成本证明它们仅在昂贵的药品和化妆品中应用是合理的。此外,每年报告的新生物表面活性剂化合物数量较少,与化学表面活性剂相比。生物表面活性剂价值链中存在多个操作问题。在这次审查中,我们根据它们在价值链中的相对位置对其中一些问题进行了分类-在规划过程中发生的障碍,上游流程,生产阶段,和下游流程-以及合理的解决方案。此外,我们已经提出了该行业在工艺开发和集成预处理方面的可用路径,结合传统的久经考验的策略,如反应器设计和统计优化与前沿技术,包括代谢建模和人工智能。技术经济上可行的生物表面活性剂生产工艺的发展将有助于石化表面活性剂的完全替代,而不仅仅是补充。
Surfactants are compounds with high surface activity and emulsifying property. These compounds find application in food, medical, pharmaceutical, and petroleum industries, as well as in agriculture, bioremediation, cleaning, cosmetics, and personal care product formulations. Due to their widespread use and environmental persistence, ensuring biodegradability and sustainability is necessary so as not to harm the environment. Biosurfactants, i.e., surfactants of plant or microbial origin produced from lignocellulosic feedstock, perform better than their petrochemically derived counterparts on the scale of net-carbon-negativity. Although many biosurfactants are commercially available, their high cost of production justifies their application only in expensive pharmaceuticals and cosmetics. Besides, the annual number of new biosurfactant compounds reported is less, compared to that of chemical surfactants. Multiple operational issues persist in the biosurfactant value chain. In this review, we have categorized some of these issues based on their relative position in the value chain - hurdles occurring during planning, upstream processes, production stage, and downstream processes - alongside plausible solutions. Moreover, we have presented the available paths forward for this industry in terms of process development and integrated pretreatment, combining conventional tried-and-tested strategies, such as reactor designing and statistical optimization with cutting-edge technologies including metabolic modeling and artificial intelligence. The development of techno-economically feasible biosurfactant production processes would be instrumental in the complete substitution of petrochemical surfactants, rather than mere supplementation.