Membrane technology as a promising alternative for less energy consumption in food industry

Membrane processes are widely employed in dairy, food and beverage industry for concentration purposes due to the advantages over classic unit operations. They include less energy consumption, low thermal damage to the product and low capital investments. The membrane process does not involve phase change for water removal and is carried out at low temperatures. Fruit juices are traditionally concentrated by multi-stage vacuum evaporation. The process consumes huge amount of energy due to high latent heat of water. Moreover evaporation results in degradation, loss of flavours, colour etc. due to the thermal effects. The promising alternative is reverse osmosis. A wide variety of fruit juices, including orange, apple, pears, grapefruit, kiwi, pineapple, passion fruit and tomato juice are concentrated using reverse osmosis. Excellent retention of juice constituents (sugars, acids, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus) is obtainable. Other membrane processes such as membrane distillation, membrane evaporators and osmotic distillation and integrated membrane processes are being developed for fruit juice and milk concentration to improve product quality and reduce energy consumption. The main purpose of these processes is finding new techniques for low cost energy saving alternatives to conventional separation procedures. In this paper we investigated the capability of membrane processes as an alternative for classical unit operations with the purpose of finding low energy consumption techniques.

Keywords:

Membrane , Energy saving , Food industry