Separating a mixture of egg yolk and egg white using foam fractionation

Abstract

A mixture created by blending with a spatula, an egg yolk and an egg white from the same egg can serve as a binary system for testing to see how well foam fractionation can be used to separate two different groups of proteins naturally found together. This mixture of two phases is particularly attractive for such a study because the two phases can be visualized distinctly when in their separated states. It has been shown that air alone at a low flow rate and with little or no water added can effect visually clean separations of egg yolk from egg white, making this a "green" separation process. The white precedes the yolk in the process, which takes less than 10 min at a laboratory scale.