Design of an integrated membrane system to produce dairy by‐product from waste processing

Abstract

Membrane technology is used in different applications. In this work, a whey-based product with a final protein content of 16% has been formulated from Scottathe last waste of the dairy industryby crossflow ultrafiltration (UF) membrane followed by vacuum evaporation (EV). Until now, Scotta was only revalorized in conjunction with whey and into the biogas production process. It was never revalorized as food in the food supply chain. UF and EV processes led to an overall water amount removed from the whey of 84.9%. A vertical configuration of the polyethersulfone (PES) hollow-fibre membrane was used in the OUT-to-IN structure. At 1.50 bar of pressure with 120 min of time interval, higher permeate flow decay has been obtained with a further reduction of the microbiological environments. A combination of intermediate and standard blocking seems to happen in all membranes, but concentration polarisation (CP) may be neglected for membranes with high fibres. The best EV operating conditions have been obtained at ten bars, with 37°C of the heating bath and 2.5 h of time, further preventing microorganism formation and protein denaturation. For future applications of Scotta revalorized in a food, it would be interesting to investigate the use of the multistage methods of membrane and evaporators to obtain a low specific energy consumption and to reduce costs further.

Application of Artificial Neural Networks for Modelling and Control of Flux Decline in Cross-Flow Whey Ultrafiltration

“…In contrast, the second was installed in a vertical configuration and had an Out-to-In filtration mode. It was experimentally demonstrated that the first system had a greater tendency to cause fouling than the second [3]. The normalized permeate flux predicted in the post-training and post simulation analyses are compared with the experimental data in Figures 5 and 6.…”

“…This is particularly true for the dairy industry, in which its use is now distributed in all stages of the supply chain, e.g., separation and fractioning of fat from milk, whey defatting, casein concentration, and bacteria removal from milk [1]. Additionally, it is significant in the recovery of waste from the dairy industry [2], especially for the whey serum-the waste produced during cheese production-and the following "scotta"-the waste produced during ricotta production [3]. Both have a high 2 of 16 pollutant load with a COD of around 60,000-80,000 mg/L and water content of 90-94%.…”