1 reply to this topic

[designaplant]

Hi,

I am a student currently doing a plant design.
I have decided to use microfiltration and nanofiltration processes to concentrate sugar content from 4% to 10%. Right now only the mass flow rate of input liquid is known.

How can I operate the calculations ? Is there any heuristics that I can follow?

Thanks!

[markymaark]

Microfiltration will not help you much. Assuming the solution is binary with just sugar/water then both will pass through a microfilter membrane.

Nanofiltration will be a wrong selection too. Nanofilter membranes will reject Sugar but let salts/water pass through. Your permeate will be more dilute sugar water and your retentate will be concentrated sugar/water.

I would look more into flash distillation. The amount of water needed to evaporate to raise the concentration to 10% is an easy mass balance. From there, figure out the energy needed to evaporate that much sugarwater. Remember to account for the BP change due to sugar.

Evaporation will be much much much much easier for you to model as a student.

Ultrafiltration (UF), Nanofiltration (NF) and Microfiltration (MF) are not as feasible for what you are trying as compared to evaporation.

Mark