Cleaning strategies for membrane fouled with protein mixtures

Abstract

Membrane application in food and dairyindustry faces an important issue of membranefouling by proteins. Membrane cleaning hasimportant economic and environmental implica-tions for the overall performance of membraneprocess. Previous studies have revealed thatsome components in the fouling layer are easy toremove by rinsing while other componentsrequire specific cleaning strategies. However,studies on the membrane cleaning procedure arelimited in the literature and information in itsindustrial application particularly in food anddiary application are scarce. Building on our pre-vious research capacity in characterizing foulingphenomena in protein containing solutions [1]which includes flux monitoring, SEM imaging,deposited protein components identificationusing matrix assisted laser desorption ionization-mass spectrometry (MALDI-MS) technique [2]and Lowry method [3] for total protein amountmeasurement, this study aims firstly to investi-gate cleaning efficiency of four types of typicalcleaning agents for proteinaceous deposits onmembranes fouled by binary protein mixtureand sweet whey powder solution which containsproteins, lactose, salt and minerals and secondlyto study the protein removal kinetics duringcleaning process in order to optimize the clean-ing performance and to provide information forcleaning modeling and performance prediction.